The cliche may be more that confirmation bias than anything else.
Small n.
I’d guess crappy handwriting is pretty endemic especially among professional who feel pressed for time and would much rather be spending their time doing other aspects of their job than the writing.
This discussion reminds me of something Dmitri Borgmann wrote: “I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications’ incomprehensibleness”
If you don’t understand it, it looks nicer in monospaced fonts with one word per line.
Another data point: my boss has absolutely atrocious handwriting. He’s a lawyer. It’s only through experience with his writing that anybody can discern his scrawl. I do think it is, in part, a reflection of the busyness of the professional job coupled with some definite arrogance (e.g. his writing takes the form of notes on a file, and he will routinely take up multiple lines when writing a simple sentence).
As a lawyer myself, I can also vouch for the fact that we are expected to take lots of notes in law school, which encourages a tendency towards a personalized shorthand which leads to a deterioration of one’s handwriting. Now, though, students take notes on their laptops, so bad handwriting may just become a consequence of lack of practice.
Signatures also tend to become quicker, and therefore sloppier, when a person signs their name all the time.
Doctors have bad handwriting to hide bad spelling. Honestly!
Well, when I applied to medical school, the school I eventually got accepted at required a handwritten essay. My theory is that if they can actually read what you wrote they realize how stupid you are but if they can’t read it then they think you are brilliant and accept you. Therefore, the admissions process selects for applicants with the most illegible handwriting. Either that or carpal tunnel syndrome.
A funny story-when I used to work for a hospital we had our dreaded Joint Commission visit. They selected a few charts from each doctor to review. I had always gotten grief about my illegible handwriting, to the extent that I once actually attended a course in improving handwriting for physicians. Even I couldn’t always decipher what I wrote. The person from the Joint Commission carefully looked through all of the charts. She came to mine and stated happily “Finally, a chart with handwriting I can actually read!” Every staff member looked around with a shocked expression but nobody wanted to question just how she was apparently the only person alive who could read my handwriting. It did give me some ammunition in the future whenever anybody criticized my handwriting.
I recall an anecdote, heard long ago, I now forget from whom; but this person was struck by how their family doctor had – contrary to the cliche – beautiful handwriting. Remark made on this, in a complimentary way. The doctor responded, mock-ruefully: “I know – I’m a disgrace to my profession”.
Had exactly the same experience. As a lawyer, my lawyer boss would review and write notes on my drafts. That he made NO effort to make his comments legible was one of many aspects of his assholishness.
Big difference between scribbling personal notes that only you can decipher, versus something you know someone else is going to have to read and act on.
Familiarity and context are big points, tho. My mother had notoriously bad handwriting. I remember her saying she would just write the first couple of letters followed by approximately the right number of bumps! :smack: Yet, because I was familiar with her “bumps”, as well as her personality and manner of speaking, I rarely had difficulty reading one of her letters. Now if I came across some of her handwriting out of context, that would be harder.
I like the South Korean practice (sorry about the pun). Hand-written prescriptions are illegal and medical records must be typed up from the notes daily (the last I gleaned from my month-long hospital experience back in 2008). So, how are the prescriptions done? It sounds complicated, but it’s not, really:
[ul][li]The doctor, after examining you, types the prescription into theirt computer.[/li][li]The desk nurse prints out the prescription and stamps the practice’s corporate do-jang (name seal) on the prescription.[/li][li]The doctor then stamps the prescription with their own do-jang and gives you the prescription.[/li][li]You take the prescription to the pharmacy.[/li][li]The pharmacist checks to see if they have the doctor’s do-jang verification page from city hall (or the district office); if not, they confirm with city hall electronically.[/li][*]Then the pharmacist prepares your medicine and you get it, all neatly packaged in little packets telling you which day and time of day to take the medicines in the packet. (It’s similar in concept to this outfit.)[/ul]
When I was a temp I noticed some things about handwriting. Lawyers–bad, with exceptions. Engineers–good. No exceptions.
Journalists have very bad handwriting on the whole, mainly I think because they do not want anybody else to be able to read their notes. I used a combination of shorthand (very sloppy) and my own spdwrtng sstm. Ask me if I could even read my own notes a few days later. (Nope.) But it occasionally happens that the managing editor has to write a story from someone else’s notes. This is when you make stuff up and end up misquoting ppl.
ETA: as a temp I worked for one lawyer whose handwriting was almost exactly like mine. To the point that, when he borrowed my embosser and notarized something and faked my signature, I only knew it because I knew I hadn’t done it. Maybe a professional graphologist could have proved that wasn’t my signature, but as an amateur graphologist and the person whose signature it was supposed to be, I couldn’t. (I quit.)
My favorite illegibility anecdote is about Horace Greeley, who had notoriously bad handwriting.
Some typesetters, exasperated at trying to read Greeley’s scrawls, decided to prank him. They dipped a chicken’s feet in ink and dragged them across a sheet of paper. One of them went to him and said “Sir, I couldn’t quite read this word in your editorial,” pointing to a random place on the page. Greeley looked at it and said, “‘Unconstitutional’, you damn idiot!”
In the 1970’s/80’s, when Doctors had to actually write prescriptions, you could expect a pharmacist in Aus to reject or telephone the originating doctor if the prescriptions was written in clear script. And Doctors were told that. And new graduates were taught that: if your script looks clear and easy to read, your patient will have trouble getting it filled.
I imagine this would have been more of an issue with pain killers than with hemorrhoid cream, but I don’t remember seeing it discussed at that level of detail.
Going back to the OP: I don’t think this would have been the original reason why doctors scribbled prescriptions! And at the hospital, the accountant spent one afternoon every 2 weeks signing paychecks. He’d do a block of 20 minutes, then take a 5 minute break, then another 20 minutes… His signature was pretty simple too.