Does your own suffering help you to be a better doctor? Does acknowledging and embracing your losses help you to attend compassionately to those who are mortally injured or suspended in the purgatory between life and death? Maybe, as Michele writes, being on the brink of despair enabled her to “uncover a newfound freedom,” one grounded in love for others, and for herself. But if I knew that an irritable surgeon was going through a heart-wrenching divorce, might I be able to address his outbursts with more compassion? If I found out that a medical student couldn’t bear to perform a urologic exam not because of immaturity but because of a history of sexual abuse, how might I teach her an essential skill differently?ĭoctoring and healing are not the same thing, as Michele comes to realize, though they may go hand in hand. Michele openly discusses topics that I know for a fact many of my colleagues have experienced but would never share, fearing that doing so would compromise their reputation. Michele’s journey continues on, and she shows us how precisely she dealt with her past by first acknowledging it, then accepting and even embracing it. These stories are the truth of why many of us practice medicine-tending to the wounds of others changes our relationship to our own wounds. She tells her readers what it was like to live with a violent father who frequently beat her mother, and how she eventually left that home to attend Harvard and become an emergency room physician-but not without experiencing the crumbling of her marriage. She shows us, chapter by chapter, what it means to practice emergency medicine as both a Black doctor encountering racism and a person who has witnessed and survived terrible abuse. Michele Harper’s memoir challenges this one-dimensional portrait of physicians by excavating her own personal history, holding it up to the light, and pushing her readers to do the same. Though we tend to the vulnerable night and day, we physicians must find ways to suppress our own humanity and vulnerability while on the job.
Yet I am keenly aware that my own humanity, in all of its beauty and brokenness, is not allowed in the rooms where I minister to patients and teach my colleagues how to balance a respect for personhood with invasive, painful ways of treating illness with medications and machines. As a writer and a palliative medicine physician myself, I help patients retain their humanity by helping them to articulate what matters most to them in the face of illness and death.
We are chastised for being robotic or standoffish, yet our professionalism might be questioned if we cry in front of a colleague or patient.
We are both expected to play God and admonished for thinking we are God. Doctors inhabit a strange place in American society.
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