Are You Really the Doctor?, Matthew Hutchinson’s memoir of being a black doctor in the NHS, opens in A&E with a patient suffering from a thunderclap headache and taking time out from his excruciating pain to complain that Hutchinson is “very scruffy”. “I’m wearing scrubs, the pyjama-like, hospital-issue uniform – something pretty difficult to put your own personal flair on,” Hutchinson writes, concluding wearily that the guy must have been reacting to something else: “Skin, hair, or general … vibe.” You couldn’t call it a microaggression, the patient’s assumption that, being black, Hutchinson was unlikely to be an expert. But this anecdote barely registers on the Geiger counter of bigotry in healthcare that Hutchinson writes about trenchantly and acerbically, from the prejudices doctors face from patients and the gender and race blindspots in medical textbooks, to the racism that could endanger a patient’s life (black women are four times more likely to die during childbirth).
Meeting Hutchinson in the Guardian’s offices in London, he emanates forethought and competence. Even in shorts and a T-shirt, he seems like the kind of guy who couldn’t look scruffy if he tried. He says the book he’s written about race had to be done, but “I’ve spoken to people who are non-white and female, and without even prompting, they’ve said: ‘Actually, the thing that is held more against me is being a woman.’” Hutchinson’s wife, Louise, is a GP. “The lack of respect that can be shown to female doctors is outrageous, sometimes by certain other healthcare professionals, not even patients. In the same way, we haven’t really had a book, as far as I’m aware, about being disabled as a doctor and the lack of access to medical school for someone with a disability. I’ve met only one doctor with a hearing impairment in the entire time I’ve been working.”
