Recently, I watched a seven-part BBC dramedy called This Is Going to Hurt. It's based on a memoir by an English OB-GYN resident named Adam Kay about his time in an NHS hospital ward in the early 2000s.
I recommend it.
I was reminded of it when I heard a short interview on NPR last weekend with a U.S. doctor named Anna DeForest. She has a new novel out called A History of Present Illness, which she wrote while she was in medical school. It sounds as though it may provide an American side to Kay's perspective on the British system.
In the interview, the discussion focuses particularly on how U.S. doctors are taught to distance themselves from their patients. DeForest had the special chance to reread her own words from her time as a medical student after she had finished school and residency and see how much she had changed and been hardened to her patients by the training process.
At the close of the interview, she says something that caught my attention particularly. This is part paraphrase and part quote, but I'm quoting the important parts:
Power is not a feeling — it's an absence of obstacles. How do you then teach people who have power to be cautious in how they wield it, that they don't deserve it, that it's a mystery why some people get and some people don't? It just takes a lot of humility.
Unfortunately, humility is not something that doctors (especially surgeons, I've heard) are taught to have.
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I'm a bit obsessed with the idea of deserving, I admit. Some past posts:
- Deserving: The Foundational Lie (February 2021)
- The Lucky Michael Lewis (June 2012)
- Luck of the Wealthy (October 2011)
- Badly Served by "Deserve" (September 2011)
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