Rachel Berlin recounts her experiences as a third year medical student on an internal medicine clerkship and the relationship she had with the senior resident who supervised her work, Hassan. The story touches on several themes, including the process of developing competence in diagnosis through practice with patients and interaction with a mentor, and the emotional work of learning to treat patients in a system in which you aren’t always around to learn the outcome of care and in which you don’t always have time to respond as you might wish to patients who face serious diagnoses or who are dying. An element of the story also concerns Hassan’s status as an immigrant far away from his family in an unnamed war-torn country, repeating his residency in order to qualify for a US medical license.
In my course on the role of narrative in medical practice, I teach a week on how medical students are socialized to become physicians and the role of storytelling in medical practice and socialization to medical practice. This brief personal story would be a useful companion piece to some of the anthropological research I teach.
Access
- Link: https://pulsevoices.org/stories/no-one-left-to-save/
Details
Language: English
Type of Story: Brief story
Medium: written
Contributed by: Daena Goldsmith
Citation:
Berlin, R. (2023, December 15). No one left to save. Pulse. https://pulsevoices.org/stories/no-one-left-to-save/