Medical Students' Disease - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

In his comic classic Three Men in a Boat (1889), Jerome K. Jerome describes the effect as experienced by a layman:

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of "premonitory symptoms," it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus's Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too,—began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight...

An episode of the TV show Scrubs called Our Driving Issues features a class of medical students who, despite having been warned about medical students' disease, nevertheless suffer from it. In an ironic plot twist, the one student who is unconcerned about his symptoms turns out to have skin cancer.