Ojmed

You’ll see each other once a year.

1. She’s a listening pro. She spends all day listening to patients, lecturers, residents, attending doctors, so she’s basically a professional listener. So if you spill your deepest, messiest emotions, she’ll accept them and try to understand them. Unless it’s the day after a 24-hour call day, in which case haha, no, she already fell asleep.

2. Plan every date at least 10 years in advance, if possible. See no. 1. Sister’s bat mitzvah? Best friend’s wedding? Casual cup of coffee? She can’t make it. She has a test tomorrow and every day x 1,000 forever.

3. You’ll only see her once a year at, like, 2:45 p.m. for 10 minutes. Because even once she finishes finals, there’s always another final. And a final after that. And then a presentation and an oral exam and a 500-page review textbook to read. Basically, “I …

“We sat in there, topless. It was fun to look at everyone’s breasts, and you could see people’s dicks too. You weren’t allowed to comment on them if they were bent, but you’d know,” says an anonymous female medicine student to our reporter. She is talking about the Shaft (Skakten in Danish).

Until recently, the Shaft was a small room off the place where the Fredagsbaren (Friday drinks night) took place in the Panum complex, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen. The Shaft was closed off recently in connection with the construction of the new Maersk Building – Panum Tower. To enter the Shaft you had to be either topless or bottomless. It’s infamous – a reference understood by all students of medicine. Is there a unique sex culture at the University of Copenhagen’s Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences? And what do you find if you, …

Despite being the training grounds of one of the most trusted professions, medical schools have quite an unsavoury reputation. Rumours abound of archaic hazing rituals and alcohol-fuelled nights out to “release stress”, ranging from the once-famous Princeton Nude Olympics to the recent much-publicised antics of my own fellow doctors-to-be. Thankfully, UK medical schools have been largely purged of such humiliating rituals and where they do exist, they are mainly mild and viewed as curious remnants from a different age. (Although we were once made to attend a “naked pub crawl” which was apparently once underwear-only, but these days large lab coats are allowed. It was, however, December. Amazingly enough, none of us made 9am lectures the next day.)

But right across the Channel we have France, which in many ways is a different planet. Much like in England, hospitals in France have rooms (salles des garde) for medical students to …