“Here’s my Story, Doc”
Across the country, medical schools are requiring doctors and medical students to take writing classes in an effort to produce clean case histories and see their patients as human beings rather than statistics. The thinking goes that if you have the language to tell a patients’ story (“Jane Doe had a ruptured spleen” rather than “The spleen was ruptured”), you can imagine them as a real person. Bellevue, the psychiatric hospital in New York even has its own literary journal.
Reading this reminded me of my undergraduate days at Johns Hopkins as a rare humanities major in a sea of pre-meds, a bit like being the assistant chaplain at West Point. The two science geeks I lived with would alternate between making fun of my inactive career goals (“Ohhh Writing Seminars. You want fries with that?”) and begging me for counsol on their term papers (“Uhhh, Kev. What’s a passive verb?).
We didn’t stay friends but now I know what a Hippocampus is and hopefully they can string two sentences together. If not, I say send ’em’ to Bellevue!