• Adult anaesthesia

Doctors are prolific writers, often without realising it. We each spend a great deal of time writing in patient files or on computer records. During a medical career, every one of us probably writes the equivalent of many full length novels or even an encyclopaedia. We write automatically, often at great speed, drawing mainly on a repertoire of verbal formulas that we have learned from others. Yet our notes reveal more than we are aware of—not just about our patients but about ourselves and the wider culture in which we live. Medical notes written a century ago, carefully entered with pen and ink into leather-bound ward ledgers, are vastly different from the notes in modern case folders, bulging with computer printouts and copies of correspondence. The differences are testimony not only to changing technologies and scientific knowledge. They show radically altered forms of thinking and social relations as well.