Full Description
A critical care doctor becomes one of the first physicians in the United States to contract COVID-19. A pediatrician reflects on her father's passing during her final year of medical school. A Muslim surgeon contemplates whether residency has replaced his faith. An orthopedic surgeon wonders, after a decade of training, if he made the right choices after the death of his brother-in-law. An African American resident painfully asks: Do Black lives truly matter to white coats?
For decades, medical humanists have advocated for attending to patients as "whole persons." So, too, the time has come to see physicians as "whole persons." In this urgent, moving collection of essays, a diverse group of early-career physicians write about common experiences in medicine--such as the grueling nature of internship and residency--from a fresh, up-to-date perspective. With particular attention how to the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and identity influence clinicians' experiences as caregivers, the featured practitioner-authors reflect on endurance, suffering, and the politics of wellness across their personal and professional lives, delicately capturing a new dimension of healthcare previously unfamiliar to wider audiences.
Medicine, Meaning, and Identity invites readers to reconsider the doctor not as a hero, but rather as a complex, whole person; not merely as a healer, but as an integral community member in acute need of healing.
Contents
Introduction (Nathan Carlin and Keisha Ray)
Dating and Relationships in Residency (Sungita Kumar)
Black Lives and White Coats (Gabriel Sandoval)
Physicians as VIPs (Lilit Sargsyan)
My Father Always Wanted Me to Be a Doctor (Ellen Wong)
Our Children Inherit What We Don't Resolve (Latoya Comer Frolov and Alex Frolov)
The Residency Match (Erin Foss)
Penumbra (Agathe Streiff)
Life, Limb, and Function (Nathan Rogers)
Modern Psychiatry (Enstin Ye)
Your Patient Will See You Now (Amanda Actor)
Disregard of Duty (Jai Gandhi)
I Live You (Claire Poche)
Lamenting What Happened (Amanda Cooke)
Shukar Alhamdulillah (Farrukh Virani)
A Love Forgotten (Jessie DiCarlo)
Epilogue (Nathan Carlin and Keisha Ray)
