Doctors in the Making: Memoirs and Medical Education

Doctors in the Making: Memoirs and Medical Education

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Not to be able to do that is to be illiterate. And that is what we are addressing at this conference: Is it possible to understand someone else's reminiscences, someone else's life?

Adam Kay: ‘If I had kids I would put them off studying medicine’ | Books | The Guardian

Published Sep 16, The Year of Janusz Korczak, Tourwarsaw. In mid-life he gave up his successful practice to run a Jewish orphanage without salary, still writing and conducting radio programs. During WW II, the occupying Germans forced the orphanage into the cordoned portion of Warsaw known as the ghetto; he moved there with his children. In April , the ghetto was being liquidated, its inhabitants sent to death camps for extermination. He stayed with his children rather than accept offers of freedom provided because of his celebrity.

He kept a diary, which was hidden, later found and published as A Ghetto Diary, the source of these earlier fragments. This is the kind of Life-Writing by physicians to which I am referring. Virginia Woolf is credited with creating the term Life-Writing , now an accepted form of literary scholarship better known in the UK, where it has found a home in several university centers. I was fortunate to be a Visiting Scholar at one: Many physicians write, but not all physician writing is life-writing. Raymond Tallis has been recognized for philosophical books about the roots and methods of medicine Tallis, These authors speak ex cathedra, remaining in their white coats.

These are big books that receive both awards and recognition that is well deserved. But I wish also to consider other voices, recalling Hawkins, "the voice of the individual who is inevitably lost in that impersonal professional voice.

The written word endures with a gravity that the spoken word may miss. Verba volent, scripta manent [words are fleeting, writing endures]. David Loxterkamp is a general practitioner in a small town on the Maine coast detailing the day-to-day in A Measure of My Days Loxterkamp, Claire McCarthy is an inner city pediatrician in Boston who wrote from her medical school and residency experiences at Harvard: Learning How the Heart Beats: From preliminary searches, I estimate that some thousand or so such accounts have been published from through It is tempting to acquire these books, categorize them, look for patterns, and generate theories and structures.

In medicine, we do that very well. We approach the unknown this way. But already in , Alfred Korzybski, creator of the Theory of General Semantics, had warned us that: Oliver Sacks at his New York City home in Out Late With Oliver Sacks. New York Times August 26, For Oliver Sacks Figure 4 , the map was not the territory. He often went beyond succinct clinical summaries of the sort students and young doctors feel they must learn to create out of the jumble of subjective and objective information they obtain from personal encounters and reviews of objective data about their patients as they learn to master the writing of concise, distilled summaries.

Perhaps it was these non-contributory elements that led Sacks away from the map. He dove deeply into details of migraine and its equivalents, producing extensive clinical case reports, using as a model those cases of Edward Liveing written in Auden had read these earlier works, neither of which was especially successful when first published, and became his friend. Sacks did not write without criticism. Others remove names and identifiers. We know they are telling us stories of real life that, despite whatever alterations, seem plausible.

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They must, else they would run the risk of straying too far from what drove Robert Lowell, in his poem Epilogue , to ask: And so we read these works of those who say what happened, such as the personal vignettes of McCarthy and Transue. Albert Schweitzer and Tom Dooley Figure 7 also found their own countries earlier in the 20 th century. Many conferences could be devoted to the lives and writings of these two men. Louis Post-Dispatch , Jan 18 How much were they missing by not knowing about him, let alone, not reading anything by him or about him?

Or, I wondered, was I out of touch with the present, pre-occupied by nostalgia for the past? Why did Schweitzer matter to me? Maybe I was missing something?

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Were these doctors humanists because of what they wrote or because of how they lived? Is it the literature they created or the lives they lived that matter more to us? We sense that their accounts are deeply human in perspective, giving us first hand descriptions filtered through a clinical intelligence that we as doctors understand and can often recognize as being similar to our own. Where exactly do they fit into literature, into medicine? World War II left us many memoirs by military physicians at the front, but I will speak of three left by civilians.

Memoirs of a Physician

Figure 8 L photo: Los seis de Hiroshima. He was present within the killing radius of the first atomic bomb. Get free access to newly published articles Create a personal account or sign in to: Register for email alerts with links to free full-text articles Access PDFs of free articles Manage your interests Save searches and receive search alerts. Sign in to save your search Sign in to your personal account.

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I will rejoice in being able to use it and refer to it in my teaching and writing. Women Write Their Bodies. Suzanne Poirier is professor emerita of literature and medical education at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, Chicago. Language, Literature, and Analysis. Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support?

Recent surveys of medical students reveal stark conditions: Compounded by long hours of intellectually challenging, physically taxing, and emotionally exhausting work, medical school has been called one of the most harrowing experiences a student can encounter. Although most students emerge from medical education as well-trained, well-prepared professionals, few of them will claim that they survived the process unscathed. The authors of these accounts document—for better or for worse—the ways in which they have been changed. Read more Read less.

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