Dr Peter Moore: Rumours on steroids

Agatha Christie was in a railway carriage when two ladies got in and sat opposite her. They both pulled out one of her books to read with no idea who she was.
“She must be very wealthy by now”, one commented.
“Not at all”, the other one said. “She’s an alcoholic, spends all her money on drink and lives in poverty”.
Agatha Christie was a lifelong teetotaller and, at the time, lived in Greenway which is not exactly poverty.
She found this story amusing and it shows how completely false rumours can take hold. Today we might say fake news.
When I was working in a GP practice in Plymouth a rumour spread that the senior partner had suddenly dropped dead. It was either a heart attack or a stroke. In fact, he was very well but someone of the same name had collapsed and died, so we could see how the rumour started.
Patients would say to me “is Dr Gilmour OK?” without mentioning why they were asking.
When I answered “Yes, he’s fine” they looked relieved. I was tempted to ask whether they had heard the rumour of the stroke or heart attack.
I dread to think what rumours spread about me. I probably did not hear them but I can remember one.
Not long after we moved to our village we built an extension onto our house. It was our neighbour, who laughingly asked whether she could book her children into our nursery school. A rumour spread around the village that we were building a new nursery school to rival the village nursery.
With a busy job and a young family, we had no intention of running a school but, as my wife was a primary school teacher and we were enlarging our house perhaps, they had put two and two together and made five.
To a certain extent, rumours can be a part of the price we pay for living in a small community. If no one knew who we were, the rumour would be meaningless.
I was brought up in a small town were my father taught biology. He had a degree from Cambridge but it did not stop a rumour going round that he had no qualifications but it was my mother who was a brains behind his subject.
She had left school at sixteen with an after-school certificate, the 1930s version of GCSE. None of these rumours harmed anyone’s reputation but some false rumours can be damaging.
We heard, wrongly, that a friend was having an affair. Knowing him, it was highly unlikely but it turned out that the rumour was based on someone who saw him giving a lift to a young woman and that he was also seen using a public phone box when he had a phone at home.
All these actions were entirely innocent but then I realised that I could also have been implicated by the same evidence.
We were training young doctors, and I did take them on my visits. Some were women. I also used public phone boxes to ring in to check whether there were any more calls. There were no mobile phones.
Today, the internet can create rumours on steroids. Anonymous people with strange names can start the most ludicrous rumour. Professional journalists do not write stories based on rumour. If they hear a rumour they will carry out an investigation to corroborate the evidence. They also know that if the rumour is both damaging and completely untrue they might be sued.
Tittle tattle and gossip is always interesting and it is often tempting to pass it on. We may even add a bit of elaboration. But, as with Agatha Christie, it may be completely wrong. I wonder what would have happened today with the Internet. Would the false stories about Agatha have gone viral?