Doctor Who: 10 Crazy Internet Reactions To The 13th Doctor
10. It's Doctor Who Not Nurse Who
Hope they dont announce a woman doctor tomorrow!! It's DOCTOR who, not NURSE who!! Haha rt to show support fellow men don't let the fems win
— Rory (@RoryMeep) July 15, 2017
Despite the fact that more than half of
all GPs in the United Kingdom are women, this ‘joke’ comment keeps popping up
online. Even the nurse bit is a gross distortion of the facts. Hospital nursing
might be underrepresented by men (around one in ten), but in the community
there are nearly as many male carers as there are female.
Applying such outdated stereotypes to Doctor Who is highly blinkered: have they forgotten that the Doctor has had both a female student Doctor (Martha Jones) and a male nurse (Rory) as companions? The term Doctor applies to the Time Lord only in its broadest sense – as someone who defines herself as a caregiver. Behind the ‘joke’ is all kinds of wrong, not only false assumptions about careers and gender, but also an implicit ranking of each profession’s relative value and importance.
Doctor Suzanne Koven, writing for the Boston Globe notes that “In an outpatient practice such as mine, the distinction between doctors’ and nurses’ roles can be subtle. Nurse practitioners, who have both bachelors and masters degrees plus special certification, prescribe medication, perform physical exams, and act in many ways indistinguishable from doctors.”