Sitting in a classroom at Georgetown Medical School usually reserved for committee meetings, we begin by reading an Emily Dickinson poem about the isolating power of sadness:
I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, eyes –
I wonder if It weighs like Mine –
Or has an Easier size.
It’s a strange sight: me, a surgical resident, reading poetry to 30 medical students late on a Tuesday night. Some of us are in scrubs, others in jeans; there are no white coats. Over the past four years, as the leader of the group, this has become my routine.
The students are here after long days in class and on the wards because they have discovered that medical education is changing them in ways that are unsettling. I remember that uneasiness well. My own medical education began with anatomy lab. The first day with the cadaver was unnerving, but after the first week the radio was blaring as we methodically dissected the anonymous body before us….more