The Rock'n'Roll Doctor

The Rock ’n’ Roll Doctor

I remember well the visit to the doctor in the foreign land although it was over 20 years ago, etched on my memory because the doctor was, putting it mildly, quite a character. He was also a Rock’n’Roll afficionado which put us on a solid footing. I also remember that rightly or wrongly I decided not to tell him I was also a doctor, causing me to recall ruefully that it would have been easier if I had owned up to a similar background. But then it was the South of France and I didn’t wish to declare a contrast between my medical experience and my lack of French.  

Dr Louis Lottisse was about halfway through his afternoon patients, and the last one would be me, a Scottish doctor now living in Brisbane, Australia. I was on holiday for a couple of weeks staying with an old friend. Soon after I arrived I got a sore throat and felt tired, possibly a combo of jetlag and a fair bit of the local wine to celebrate my visit – there was also diarrhoeia. I decided that some drugs were needed as the condition intensified, medication to help my holiday. I hoped the French doctor would have some English  – not too many doctors in Australia speak French! So I doubted we would have much conversation.  

I remember the warmth and sunshine, heading for the doctor’s clinic, conditions in which Doc Louis would rather have been swimming in the Mediterranean. I glimpsed him for the first time after I had been in the waiting room about ten minutes. Louis popped his head round the door to say “bonjour” to several waiting patients. I thought his manner a tad too blithe for comfort but let it go as some regional mannerism. He noticed that the temperature of the room was not good, the air conditioning not on. He stepped in to switch it on, apologising for invading the privacy of his patients as if it was odd to be mixing with them in the waiting room, and stranger still switching on the air con. There was something touching in his manner, a shyness underneath the flickering smile, as his patients nodded their gratitude for medical connection and the first comfort dispensed by the doctor.

He then turned, went to the doorway, paused, looked back, leaned in and put his hand behind his ear listening. “Oh, pas de musique!” He rushed off to fix the volume. The first patient was called a few minutes later to Peter Sarstedt singing: 

Where do you go to my lovely, when you’re alone in your room?

Next up was Mick Jagger with “Sympathy for the Devil” and then “Blueberry Hill” by Fats Domino. Elvis followed with “That’s All Right”, a good title for a doctor’s surgery! Mick was singing “Satisfaction” as Doc Lottisse followed his patient out to settle the bill, all the while mouthing the words and doing little skips as if rock’n’rolling.  

I couldn’t help joining in, even standing up to do it. Doc Louis came over and said he was crazy about all old rock music and asked me if I’d like to see his collection of LPs, lovingly gathered over 35 years. I said that would be very nice, thinking another time. No, the Rock’n’Roll doctor meant right there and then – clearly it didn’t matter to him that people were in his waiting room! For me it was not to be missed, a Rock’n’Roll moment! Anyway, the other patients would be enjoying the great music in the waiting room. Louis said a good dose of music from the Stones was therapeutic for sick people, quite calming, taking their minds off their ailments, rocking down through memories of their crazy pasts. 

We crossed the courtyard and went into the doctor’s huge ivy-mantled house. I was admitted to his special room full of Rock’n’Roll memorabilia. Within minutes we were both rocking and rolling to the thunderous beat of “Street Fightin’ Man”, the reasons for my visit to a medical man miraculously forgotten. Then we had a go at “Hippy Hippy Shake” by the Swinging Blue Jeans with Doc Louis screaming along, his eyes closed as he gyrated and whirled, his stethoscope an extra dancer round his neck: 

Well, now you shake it to the left / You shake it to the right / You do the hippy shake shake / With all of your might / Oh baby! / Yeah, come on and shake / Oh, it's in the bag / Ooh, the hippy hippy shake, wow!

As if that great rocker from the locker wasn’t enough to render us almost helpless, Doc Louis put on Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire”. I had to sit down halfway through but the Rock’n’Roll doctor must have had heaps of practice because he rocked it to the end:

Come on, baby, drive me crazy

Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!

I hoped Doc Louis’s spoken English would be as good as his singing.

Later, I wondered if the next patient would have noticed that Lottisse was sweating profusely on his return. For the sake of decorum, I made sure I didn’t accompany him into the waiting room. 

I recall I waited about 25 minutes for my turn, easy enough with some great Sixties rock to mentally rock to. I do not remember why I decided not to tell Lottisse that I was in the same game, although mine was psychiatry. Perhaps I sensed that Lottisse would like to exercise his English, thinking I was with an ordinary member of the public rather than a fellow professional.

Anyway, I knew I had an “urti”, an Ozzie contraction for upper respiratory tract infection, and expected that even a foreign doctor would be able to diagnose this quickly and jot a prescription for what I had mentally self-prescribed already: some antibiotics and a bottle of cough juice. I wouldn’t mention the loose bowels, a condition I’d had all my life, thankfully not extending to verbal diarrhoeia. I also wouldn’t tell the doctor what I had self-diagnosed, knowing that doctors like to find that out by themselves. I mused over the saying that a doctor who tries to treat himself has a fool for a patient, but part of it surely was simply going to a doctor. No time now for such niceties of thinking. I went in to see Doc Lottisse to the strains of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”, making a mental note to try playing some suitable music in my own consultancy on the 15th floor of a Brisbane high-rise – probably not the Rolling Stones, although Start Me Up, The Last Time and Dear Doctor would be apt.

There was no touching my inflamed throat and glands at all, but I remember like it was yesterday there were a few seconds of fingers brushing like feathers. Now I began to wish that I had put myself on a sounder professional footing with Lottisse. He continued the “examination” by finding my blood pressure was high which would explain the nose bleeding. Doc Louis said the pressure should be lowered, so he started to write on his prescription pad. The first thing would be cortisone with a diuretic. I nodded approvingly. Then Lottisse consulted a huge and much-thumbed manual, all the while whistling jauntily as he scrawled on the pad. I remember thinking he was acting as if he were a king, regally waving his sceptre over a document to pass a decree.

Stopping whistling, he asked me to pay 22 Euros for his services, a small amount I thought, considering my Brisbane patients paid ten times as much for 30 minutes of my expertise. The odd thing was that Lottisse should handle the money himself, as if it was a “pourboire”, a tip going in his back pocket. Of course, it was simply because there was no receptionist, but still strange that the doctor should be combining his noble services with the rather lesser one of taking filthy lucre. When I handed him 30 Euros, Lottisse grubbed in his pocket for some change, and I wondered if the doctor would wash his hands before the next patient.

I departed his clinic thinking I had never ever before had an experience like that. I refer, of course, to the Rock’n’Roll, as if it were a kind of therapy or treatment. For sure I felt much better, and wondered if Doctor Lottisse did that for everyone who professed interest in his beloved Rock’n’Roll. I also wondered if there was any need to find a pharmacy for the long prescription that the good doctor had written, but that’s another story! I could hear “Honky Tonk Women” and “It’s Only Rock’n’Roll” in my head as I wandered down the street.