A Very Peculiar Practice

Lowlands University is a swamp of fear and loathing. A showpiece Sixties campus looking increasingly anachronistic in the paranoid, profit-driven Eighties, it is staffed by angst-ridden academics desperate to hang onto their privileged status amid swingeing cutbacks. It also houses what may well be the worst medical practice in the British Isles.

Fresh-faced Stephen Daker sees his new job at the Medical Centre as a chance to pursue excellence among a dedicated team. He's somewhat shaken when he meets his colleagues: the once-great Jock McCannon, practice head, proponent of alternative psychiatry, and a wildly unpredictable dipsomaniac; public school-educated fascist Bob Buzzard; and Rose Marie, an uber-feminist who sees illness as something men do to women. Dark secrets, sinister experiments, demented academics, STD epidemics, the Yankee Dollar, a desperate Creative with writer's block and a couple of nuns all conspire to make life on campus a hair-raising experience for Stephen.