JOIN USRecently, doctors at the King George’s Medical University in Lucknow have been asked to write prescriptions in capital letters to make it legible for patients. “All doctors have legendary bad handwriting and it strangely becomes all the worse when it comes to prescribing medicines,” said the great doctor and former CM of West Bengal Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy, whose own handwriting was surprisingly beautiful.
There’re so many macabre jokes on doctors and their proverbial bad penmanship, deciphered only by the chemists. And how only chemists understand doctors’ illegible handwriting is a matter of serious research!
The million-dollar question is-- why do doctors across the world write so illegibly and scribble it away? It has a scientific explanation advanced by the Neurology Department of McGill University, Montreal, Canada. A team of clinical graphologists and neuro-scientists delved into this phenomenon for eleven years and concluded in 2015 that it’s due to doctors holding the pen very lightly. Their grip on a pen is always very light because of their training in holding the scalpels and injections in a light manner for deft and highly sophisticated surgical tasks.
‘Deft-handling phenomenon’ or ‘a feather-touch handling’ in medical parlance results in holding everything in a light manner and when a pen is held lightly, the handwriting is often crabbed and difficult to decipher.
Though doctors are condemned for bad handwriting, seldom do we get to read or hear about the judges’ equally shabby handwriting. They too are accused of bad handwriting. So much so that even lawyers can’t decipher the handwritten verdicts of most of the judges.
Famous Urdu poet and judge, Justice Anand Narayan Mulla, whose own handwriting was execrable, justified this phenomenon, “Doctors and judges have to be unemotional and matter-of-fact and a practical individual has no time for khuskhatnaweesi (calligraphic handwriting).”
Finally, always remember the famous words of Dr Anton Chekhov, the Russian great who also happened to be a doctor, “The competence of a medico is measured by the degree of his (bad) handwriting.” Quite true. By the way, Dr Arthur Conan Doyle had such bad penmanship that even his wife, let alone patients, could not understand what he wrote. His compounder typed the manuscripts as the creator of Sherlock Holmes didn’t know how to type.