"Hello. I would like to study medicine, and I hope Doctor Beretn can teach me or tell me the name of someone who can teach me."

"He's with a patient at the moment," she says. "May I have your name?"

"John Watson." Introducing himself as "doctor" would be confusing, and it isn't as if he has whatever they use as the equivalent of an MD here--if they use one at all.

"Jonwatson," she repeats, writing this down. "Just take a seat, he'll be out in a few minutes."

He's gotten used to the local naming convention, but still gives both parts of his own out of habit. He takes a seat.

Beretn comes out fifteen minutes later; so does his patient, who heads out the door. "Hello there," he says.

"Beretn, this fellow wants to learn medicine," says the receptionist.

"Do you now! Tell me about that," says Beretn.

"I come from very far away, where people are somewhat different. I was a doctor there; I want to be a doctor here too. So I need to learn how to do medicine here, learn how it's different from there."

"How are people different?" asks Beretn.

"They can only be made as babies, and they start inside their creators' bodies." It sounds very strange when he says it like that, doesn't it.

"- that must take up a lot of doctors' time, that sound horrid," Beretn says.

"Yes, it can go badly wrong. The way it happens here is much safer."

"Was that your specialty?"

"No, I was in general practice."

"Injuries and colds and such?"

"Yes."

"Well, that's what I do here, too. Come have a look at a fellow I'm keeping overnight, see what you make of him."

"Okay." He nods and follows Beretn.

The fellow has a crush injury to one leg and the urine collecting from his catheter into a jar is dark brown. Even in his sleep he has a water straw dripping a slow stream of water into his mouth, tied around his head to stay in place, for him to swallow.

"The muscle injury hurt his, what's your word," he points at his own kidney, "kidney, that's it. Good that you're putting water into him."

"Very good!" says Beretn, applauding quietly so as not to wake the poor guy. "We might or might not save him, even waking him up every couple of hours to make him drink more, but he has a chance. Do you have any better treatments where you're from?"

He shakes his head sadly. "Lots of water, and hope."

Nod. Beretn leads him out of the patient's room and gets a bunch of old records and starts quizzing John about those.

His diagnoses agree with Beretn's most of the time, with the most notable disagreements revolving around psychology (Watson occasionally diagnoses things as "hysteria" or "nerves"). In a few cases the treatment Beretn used was one that British medicine hadn't invented; in a few it's the other way around.

"What is hysteria?" asks Beretn, writing down what John's been able to tell him about plasters.

"A mental complaint that happens to women under stress. It causes problems with the emotions, loss of appetite, and--I don't know the word--suddenly not being awake."