Why do Medical Doctors write in ugly penmanship in their medical prescriptions?
The same reason they write illegibly everywhere else. They are in a hurry and don’t take the time to form the letters carefully. When I was a student nurse a hundred years ago (it seems), a doctor gave me a verbal order and I couldn’t understand what he’d said (thick accent). I asked him to repeat it and I still couldn’t understand it. So I asked him to write it, and (very annoyed) he scribbled it on paper for me. It looked like chicken scratches with a big loop at the end. Even the unit secretary who was used to interpreting his handwriting couldn’t decipher it. Finally, I asked my supervisor what to do. She hunted him down, since he’d already gone on to finish his rounds, and she insisted that he write out a legible order and bawled him out summarily. Amazingly, he was perfectly capable of writing legible English language. An awful lot of wasted time can result when doctors (or any of us) don’t take the time to do things right in the first place.
