Of Penises and Vaginas

Obviously, I cannot put up pictures of penises and vaginas.
So here's a picture of Spongebob Squarepants instead.

For many of us, medical school was the first time you see another person naked. Regardless of how crude it may sound, it's the time when we see *REAL* penises and vaginas for the first time. Certainly there are those among us whose sexual exploits are already legendary before they enter medical school, but for the common people, what we know mainly come from what we see in textbooks (and perhaps on the internet, for those with time to *ahem* study extra materials).

Certainly there are stories of how those moments are. My favourite one has to be this and for obvious reasons to protect privacy, names cannot be revealed.

A female medical student was examining a groin mass, likely to be a hydrocele or a hernia. She was alone with the patient at his bedside in a subsidised ward with the curtains drawn. Her fellow students (we call them clinical group mates) were all waiting outside for her to complete the examination and describe what she examined, in other words, a short-case presentation.

She did quite a good job, talking about the location, size etc about the mass. But she went on to casually remark that this patient’s genital was hard when she thought penises should be “soft”. She then proudly declared that she picked up a clinical sign that none of us could. She described seeing “pus” come out from the tip of the penis and declared that the patient probably had some infection…

I can safely say that if she took a swab of that “pus” and sent it for microscopy, culture etc the report would probably be spermatozoan ++++. I don’t think anything will grow in the petri dish though.