I once worked as a locum in a remote mining town that had not managed to attract a permanent doctor in the previous 16 years.

The clinic receptionist warned me that my first Monday morning patient was a hypochondriac who always made an appointment to see any new locum.

My patient was a well-spoken, clean-cut and neatly dressed man who looked 20 years younger than his chronological age of 70. He was a successful opal miner and a talented opal cutter. In a former life, he had been a university-trained historian whose special interest was the Russian Revolution of 1917.

His medical concern was that the plastic surgeon who had operated on an invasive squamous cell cancer (SCC) on his nose two years earlier had missed the cancer that was eventually going to “get him”.