Fake Doctors
Dr Vernon Coleman
Few professionals are imitated as often as doctors. You never read about tricksters pretending to be shoe salesmen or estate agents but the popular newspapers sometimes give the impression that there are as many fake doctors around as real ones. The trouble is, I suppose, that it is terribly easy to pretend to be a doctor. It is, for example, much easier to impersonate a doctor than to impersonate a lawyer or a bookie. Doctors have created their own superficial jargon and shallow confidence that makes it easy for tricksters to pass themselves off as physicians or surgeons. Confidence tricksters have successfully held down senior hospital jobs for years. Everyone laughed when an Italian hospital found that one of its senior brain surgeons wasn’t even a qualified doctor. But it happens everywhere. In New Orleans a man who claimed to be head of a federal burping programme, persuaded women to allow him to fondle their breasts in order to find out if they were qualified to become potential burping instructors. In Britain a schoolboy borrowed a stethoscope and a white coat and went round to the local girls’ grammar school where he persuaded the matron to allow him to examine all the senior pupils. His ‘clinic’ only came to end when one of his ‘patients’ recognised him. And there was the fake medical officer who persuaded housewives to strip so that he could check to make sure that they weren’t suffering from unspecified infectious diseases. He even had an answer when husbands caught him examining their wives: he just persuaded them to strip too.
Taken from The Hotel Doctor by Vernon Coleman. For details of how to purchase a copy please CLICK HERE
Copyright Vernon Coleman June 2025
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