Is it really all about being 'smart'?

My life over the past two months has consisted of mainly two things: exams and clinical placements. Well, that and a little holiday in between. Not quite the 'bull riding and boobies' Lil Nas X sang about, but I have to admit I enjoy the pace of the graduate course - it certainly keeps you on your toes and you're never bored. 

Switching gears from learning bony prominences and enzymes all day to talking to sweet old ladies with cankles really got me thinking about what it takes to be a doctor and if it really is all about being 'smart'. It's often portrayed as a career that demands high factual intelligence above all else, but it has been said before and I'll say it again: medicine is not all that complicated, there is just a lot of it. It's the classic old conundrum of quantity vs quality and it definitely doesn't take an impressive IQ to work your way through the material, just time and perseverance. In fact, I'll happily put my hand up and say that I found I had to think a lot harder about experimental design while appraising a study in my undergraduate degree than I have to think about anatomy or biochemistry in medical school (and Cambridge is not the one to teach without reference to the original experiments that lead to key discoveries in said fields). 

Having said that, there is another type of intelligence I find much more key to being a good doctor and that is emotional intelligence. I thought I had substantial human contact in my previous jobs, but medicine takes this to a whole other level, because the people *are* the job itself. You go to work in the morning and you talk to the night team for handover. You do the ward round and talk to each patient individually. You go to surgery and you talk to the operating team the entire time. You don't go to surgery and you talk to the lab, the pharmacist and/or other colleagues. God forbid if you're on call - then you are getting bleeped information left, right and centre *and* then you talk to patients on their worst day this week/month/year. 

It is basically a never-ending conversation and a stream of interactions which even innocent bystanders (read: medical students) get sucked into. And it is not factual intelligence that will help you navigate the emotions of your patient and the hospital team in order to coordinate care for said patient at 2 am on a Saturday, it's emotional intelligence. Much more important and potentially more tricky to 'learn' in x years in medical school, but having a genuine desire to help seems like a strong starting point to me.