Er…Second busiest. And they weren’t all guys.
Correction of my poorly-expressed, gendered assumptions gratefully acknowledged.
Re doctor’s surgeries in their homes… Have none of you ever watched Doc Martin? No red light though, that was never a ‘thing’ here in the UK. AFIK brothels never used one either as they preferred to remain discrete.
For historical completeness and because we’re talking about arcane Australian lighting phenomena we also have Blue Light Discos, which were police-sponsored and supervised youth dances.
AND the first reference I can find for a red light over a doctor’s surgery in Australia is from 1876, so this is not some fancy post-electrical fad gone crazy.
Would you want to try to attract partners while sitting under a blue light?
If anything, it added a slight but very much needed veneer of mystery to my copious acne, corduroy pants and spasmatic dance moves.
Ultraviolet light makes your teeth and your grubby shirt look white.
PCYC (Police Citizens Youth Clubs) are still a thing here in NSW. They usually provide cheap sports facilities, and lessons in things like gymnastics or martial arts. Some might do road safety and driver safety classes too. I don’t think our local one runs any blue light discos, sadly.
Wile browsing the internet, I recently learned that before Doctors had red lights, Apothecaries had red bottles. Which, apart from not being self-illuminating, looked very much the same (but also came in green and in more ornate versions).
It may be the case that the last American apothecary signs were so ornate and multi-colored that there was no natural transition to a red electric lamp.
In the SuperCity game, which comes from Russia but got translated into British English, one of the buildings is “Dental Surgery.” In my mind I keep translating that into “Dentist’s Office.”
Visiting India when I was young, I was introduced to a “dental surgeon.” I went for many years thinking “dental surgeon” was a thing, but eventually discovered that it means simply “dentist.” I keep having to translate English into English.
I was waiting to see if this got posted because I believe it is true. As the camps moved east and west building the RRs the ladies of the night moved with them.
If you get a kick out of old building or medical pictures, you’ll see that an operating room (as distinct from a surgery) is a surgical theater:
Still?:dubious: afaik, and iirc, they never did.
You should get out more (and you a medical man …)
Never been down under.
But indeed, this hasnt been used in America.
Egad, that explains my drunken escapade when I visited Australia! I thought the madam was role-playing with that stethoscope and the digital rectal exam was a bonus!?!
And because we practice socialised medicine (or communist medicine as its known in the US) you’d have got most of your money back plus a voucher for a friend!
Just to keep this zombie twitching…
Search in Google Maps for 96 Brighton Road, South Croydon, CR2 6AD, UK. Then call up StreetView, look for the house with the blue & white sign on the bay window, then move until you can see down the passage on the left side of the house (looking from the street). This was a doctor’s house from about when it was built, and the surgery was originally a single-storey building in the back garden (still visible). Nowadays the whole house is used by a medical practice, but the patients’ entrance is still via the side passage that led to the garden building.
Beside the gate is a cast iron lamp standard: this would have been the red lamp that was still in use up to WWI to show where you could get medical assistance - levels of illiteracy were still fairly high in the poorest classes in the Victorian period and just after. Police had a big blue lamp, fire station a big red lamp, doctor a small red lamp.
I have a capture of a 1955 large scale map which still labels the garden building as “Surgery” and clearly shows the separate entrance path, I would have loved to attach this along with a capture of the StreetView, but that option isn’t open to new accounts, hence the clumsy directions above.
In addition to the Conan Doyle book Round the Red Lamp mentioned above, there was also one called The Doctor’s Red Lamp by Charles Wells Moulton published in 1904 which was another collection of tales of the lives of general practitioners, and which continues to be reprinted, probably because it’s long out of copyright. It’s findable on Amazon, and although it starts with an American tale it appears to be a British book, reinforcing the idea that this was a British habit that got carried to Australia but nowhere else.
What I mean is that they took a single family house and converted part of the downstairs into an office. I remember well the family doctor we had when I was growing up (in West Philly, not any kind of rural area). He owned a row house at 5460 Baltimore Ave. (his phone number was xxx-5460 and his licence plate was K-5460, K being his initial). The other houses along the street were single family homes. The downstairs rooms had been converted to office and lab space and he and his family lived upstairs (except the kitchen was in the back of the first floor). If they had a separate entrance, it would have had to be in the back alley.
When we moved to Montreal we had a family doctor who had similarly converted part of a single family home into an office. Since these were standalone houses, he was able to put up a separate entrance on the side for his office. The pediatrician we had for our kids had a similar arrangement. It all started to change probably in the 1970s when doctors started renting separate space in buildings.
Didn’t Dr. Cliff Huxtable have a separate office in his house for patients? It’s been so long since I’ve seen the show I don’t quite remember.