the underwear drawer

Medical Specialty Stereotype #9: Dermatology



I think the dermatologists are really smart, and I love reading their consult notes (so detailed! elaborate drug charts!) but I don't think I could handle a job that entails scraping off pieces of dandruff onto agar. I am not squeamish about too many things (blood and guts, code browns or what have you), but skin diseases are on my list of Things That Are Gross. In fact, one of the reasons that I went into Pediatrics originally is that I just couldn't handle it when, in the ER, old people would take off their socks, the motion of which was followed by a squall of white, flaky dead skin that would billow through the air before falling to the ground like so many snowflakes. Just disgusting. (With all apologies to the old people.) And don't get me started on toenails, because I won't go there.

My dad is a dermatologist (though not a Glamazon) and we used to get this skin journal in the mail called Cutis (rechristened by Joe as "Pus Weekly") that always had some god-awful photo on the cover of, I don't know, a man's desquamated testes or something. Why they didn't ship that thing in brown paper wrapping, I don't know.