This comes up secondary to some of the discussion that’s been going on here and there under the #setlock tag in recent days — specifically the last couple of days, in the wake of (among other things) the London shoot on Sunday April 14th. I’m not going to deal directly with any of those issues in this post, so don’t worry about being spoiled.
Last year for my main blog I did an article called “The Starship and the Upstairs Flat” which concerns the longstanding (and until then, one-sided) relationship between the Sherlock Holmes canon and Star Trek canon. During this, I had cause to go have a look at the Sherlock DVDs, because in “The Blind Banker” we get a quick glimpse at John’s CV, and I wanted to examine it in detail. (This was as much a harking back to old habits as mere curiosity. Nurses like to have the salient professional details about the doctors they know, and especially the ones they work with. Back in the day, when it was much harder to lay hands on pertinent details than just Googling for them, my colleagues and I were definitely not above quietly sending away for the State Board scores of doctors whose expertise we weren’t sure about.)
Anyway, John’s CV turns out to say all kinds of interesting things to a (former) health professional. Discussion follows…
An intercalated BSc is additional education that someone working toward a medical degree at King’s can pursue. You take a year off from your primary medical studies in order to focus on a supplementary or specialist area. Here’s the list of ones currently available, You can see that John’s isn’t on there, but then educational programmes like these tend to be revised fairly frequently to keep up with the state of the field. (Or, of course, the show folks might’ve just made something up, as ‘medical sciences’ sounds awfully vague for a degree that’s meant to represent a specialization.)
So, like Diane says, far from representing John’s desire to ‘get on with it,’ it means that he was willing to take extra time in order to accumulate additional education and honors.
Also, I know it’s super-popular to assign John into the field somewhere in Afghanistan, and I get that. But I really want to point out that working in Camp Bastion’s hospital would in no way be ‘settling’ for him. I’ve seen comments to the effect of it being ‘too boring/low pressure/etc.’ to suit him, and I don’t think that’s the case. Camp Bastion’s hospital sees the highest daily number of trauma cases in the world, as well as ministering to the daily medical needs of over 7000 military personnel. The hospital can see more than 35 cases of gunshot, IED, and other warzone trauma from all over the country every day, which is a frankly INSANE amount of stressful, high-adrenaline work for a surgeon or emergency doctor to handle.
For these cases, we’re not talking your familiar, well-planned and practiced surgeries. There isn’t a specific procedure you can be trained in to handle them. Trauma surgery is highly individual, often complex and extensive, requiring knowledge of multiple systems of the body and how they work together. They are often time-sensitive, and not uncommonly the patient’s life and continued ability to function is directly on the line. These surgeries often require multiple surgeons of various surgical specialization, and with 30 or more of these coming through Bastion’s doors every day, it keeps the A&E staff on the go pretty much constantly.
Even if John is not a surgeon (a point which has been pretty well covered in meta by now), if he is an emergency doctor he might serve as part of a surgical team or in ICU. Emergency doctors are notable among non-surgeons in that they’re qualified to perform a fairly extensive array of emergency first-response-style surgical procedures, and are among the preferred doctors to staff first-response teams and critical care units.
So, just to say that John could work in surgery in Camp Bastion, and it is probably in fact the highest-pressure, most adrenaline-inducing thing he could possibly do in the field of medicine. Even if it’s not as much fun to write about as him getting shot at. ^_^