On using a title

Years ago, I was asked for my name for some National Health Service form, by a receptionist whose first language was not English. After she struggled with the spelling of my surname, I just passed over a credit card so she could copy it. It showed my title as "Dr", and I lost my mini-campaign to be treated as normal by the NHS. Not that I am discriminated against in my thankfully so far limited contact with them, it is just that using my academic title confuses the system, wastes time as I have to explain I'm not a medic., and has medical staff "explaining" things to me in technical language which means nothing... All--admittedly rather desultory--efforts to get it changed have so far had no effect, despite assurances.

But I do remember one wise doctor on a course who greeted me with, "Are you one of us, or a proper one?" In the UK, strangely enough, the medical "Dr" is a courtesy title, because the MD is rare; most medics are "MB, BS" (or "MB, ChB"--two unclassified bachelor's degrees, in any case) and of course to the disconcertion of foreigners taken ill in the UK, surgeons are "Mr" or "Miss"*. By "proper one" he meant an academic doctorate, although of course there was no telling what its private connotations were ...

It came up again last week, in an out-patients' waiting room--and everyone looked up as I responded to the call for "Dr Atherton". I'm probably being hyper-sensitive and it's all trivial but I mention it because...

I've just been watching a Newsnight piece on the postponement of the badger cull. The two interviewees were a representative of the National Farmers' Union, and Dr Brian May speaking for "Team Badger". The title appeared in his on-screen label, as well as in Paxman's introduction. There is no doubt as to his entitlement to the title: PhD, Imperial College London, 2007**. In astrophysics. How does that--or indeed the reason which probably actually got him onto the programme--his previous association with some popular musical group called "Queen"--relate to his credibility as a badger advocate? (I'm with him on the badgers, as a cause, so I feel let down by his apparent need to appeal to false -OK, irrelevant--credentials.)

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*  this is entirely a matter of convention, and as far as I know, the standard and equivalence of UK medical qualifications is globally acknowledged.

**  and all credit to him for completing it thirty years after starting it--lucky he did not fall foul of the pernicious "Levinsky rules".