I’ve long enjoyed a cartoon in which a doctor is saying to a  patient: ‘No, you're not a hypochondriac. You only think you're a hypochondriac.’ Well, I quite often think that I’m a hypochondriac. I don’t know how medical school was for you, but I well remember that almost every symptom or sign of serious disease that I heard or read about, with the probable exception of haemorrhage and convulsions, made me panic. ‘I think that I’ve had symptoms like that,’ I thought to myself. As a male, it was a massive relief whenever we did obstetrics or gynaecology. I could sit back and relax, whatever we were studying couldn’t happen to me.'...