Doctors are exposed to a wide spectrum of human attitudes

That man has just spat at me. It takes a while for what has happened to sink in. But he definitely spat at me. The glob of spittle sits on the pavement a few inches from my feet, glistening. I’m not sure what to do. No one has ever spat at me before. No one’s coming to my rescue because I’m not on a ward, and the person who has just spat at me isn’t a patient. He’s just a random passer-by. I hadn’t even looked at him, let alone done something to provoke such an attack.

I turn to the man sitting next to me. “Don’t worry,” he says, “they’re always doing that sort of thing.” I stare at him and he takes a slurp of soup from the polystyrene cup, undeterred. I’ll be honest with you: when I took my current job, working with homeless people, I was a little scared. I have to try to engage with some pretty mean and nasty people. I knew it was going to be tough. But I never thought I’d be on the receiving end of this.

The man sitting next to me isn’t outraged, because he’s used to it. As I sit there, it dawns on me that the man who spat at me has done so because he thinks I’m someone else. He doesn’t realise that I’m a doctor, sitting down on the pavement, trying to persuade a patient with a gangrenous leg that he should come with me to the hospital.

And so for a brief moment I learn what it’s like to be on the lowest rung of the social ladder, quite literally scratching around in the gutter to survive. I have been on the receiving end of what the homeless people I work with experience on a daily basis. If, as Gandhi observed, a society can be judged by how it treats its weakest members, then boy, are we in trouble.

“I got a kicking at the weekend,” says the homeless man sitting next to me. “They’re always doing it. I’m an easy target, what with my leg.” I look down at his leg, which is dead from the knee down and beginning to rot. “Sometimes, they spit; sometimes, they just shout at you. Other times, it gets nasty, and they try to duff you up,” he explains.

He shows me the cuts and bruises on his body from where he was attacked. It would be easy to blame this sort of thing on louts and thugs. But the man who spat at me was wearing a tie. This behaviour isn’t motivated by poverty, or drugs, or social unease. The people who are really on the breadline are far too busy trying to survive. It’s indicative of something far more sinister, because there’s something seriously wrong when our society produces individuals who are so incapable of respecting others.

The man next to me agrees to come in to hospital, and so I try to help him stand. A teenager in a baseball cap and trainers is watching from across the road, and after a few minutes he saunters over. I’m really not in the mood for any more trouble. But as he gets nearer, he calls out: “You wanna hand?” Together, we help the homeless man to stand, and together we support him until the ambulance arrives.