Charles Krauthammer is a syndicated columnist, though he was educated as a physician. In his column today he defines rounds as the ritual whereby a senior doctor goes from bed to bed seeing patients, trailed by a gaggle of students, and then he describes roundsmanship as the art of distinguishing oneself from the gaggle with relentless deploys of erudition. A medical example he gives is when a patient has a rash after taking penicillin, and a student asks if it could possibly be a case of Shmendrick's Syndrome as he had just read about it in the latest issue of the "Journal of Ridiculously Obscure Tropical Diseases." Of course no one else has heard of it before, and the student hardly ingratiates himself to his colleagues.

A general example he gives is the husband who takes his wife to Paris for Valentine's Day, while the "rest of us schlubs" barely remember to come home with a single long-stemmed rose. He further, for some reason, calls the roundsman an Oswald.

Have you heard the term?

BTW, here is a link to the article from Google news.

I've never heard the term "Oswald" used like that. Any idea as to what it's referring?

Here's a link to the article in the Washington Post.

In the article Charles Krauthammer says of the roundsman "let's call him Oswald".

This message has been edited. Last edited by: arnie,

arnie's link doesn't work for me, but this one does.

I wondered about that, too, CW. I thought he might have just made it up.

Whoops! I must have copied/pasted the link to this page instead of that to the WP.

I'll edit the original link.