Re: “white males comprise 43.5 percent of the population but now account for less than a quarter of students at UK medical schools. In other words, being a doctor is no longer an attractive middle-class career proposition.”

Probably the funniest line of reasoning I ever read on the Internet. “Most Scottish postmen are white males” — make up your conclusion. My med students’ classes are composed mostly of middle/upper-class white females.

Aneurin Bevan, the socialist who created the National Health Service after World War II, was once asked to explain how he’d talked the country’s doctors into agreeing to become state employees: “I stuffed their mouths with gold,” he crowed. Sixty years later, no amount of gold can persuade Britons to spend their working lives in the country’s dirty, decrepit hospitals (they spend enough of their nonworking lives there, waiting to be seen, waiting for beds, waiting for operations). According to a report in the British Medical Journal, white males comprise 43.5 percent of the population but now account for less than a quarter of students at UK medical schools. In other words, being a doctor is no longer an attractive middle-class career proposition.