How a kick in the head on the rugby field made me a psychopath…and turned me into a brilliant surgeon: Top heart doctor reveals how incident ‘cured’ his anxiety and made him ‘ruthlessly competitive’

On the day in question, we were confronted by a team of hefty farmers on a muddy, windswept pitch in Penryn, near Falmouth.

I had just prevented an opposition try with an outrageously high tackle – and that inevitably provoked retaliation. I took a targeted boot to the head and was left prostrate and senseless face down in a puddle. The game went on and it was some time before these caring medical students came back for me. By then I was blue.

When I came round I was carted off to the bar. A knockout wasn’t uncommon in student rugby, and we still had some serious drinking and singing to do. Next morning my friend Steve Norton tried to wake me and I responded by projectile-vomiting over his legs. My head hurt and the winter sunlight burned my eyes. Steve could see I was in deep trouble and called the GP.

All my signs pointed to a battered, swollen brain. I was dispatched by ambulance to the neurological unit at Truro Hospital.

This spelled the end of my jolly tour and could have heralded the end of my medical career. Bizarrely, it had quite the opposite effect.

X-rays revealed a hairline crack in the frontal bone of my skull. But as the doctors and nurses tried to hook up a drip and catheter, I apparently resisted. I was agitated and overtly aggressive, no longer the mild-mannered, sensitive lad who had travelled down to Cornwall. Something had changed.

A psychologist later explained to me that head trauma affected the part of my brain responsible for critical reasoning and risk-avoidance. This explained my new-found lack of inhibition, my irritability and occasional aggression.

I thought I’d been polite to the nurses, but it seems not. The psychologists’ tests showed that I scored highly on something called ‘psychopathic personality inventory’ and the psychologist told me: ‘Don’t worry – most high achievers are psychopaths. Particularly surgeons.’




https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6818263/How-kick-head-psychopath-turned-brilliant-surgeon.html

I think most people don't realise just how many psychopaths walk among us. Personally, I'd rather be poor and non psycho than wealthy and successful and ruthless.