By this the time of year, most first-year medical students have finished with anatomy. Anatomy: for most of us, this course is our first time seeing a deceased human being in an academic setting. And for some of us, the first cut we make on the first day of anatomy is the first cut we make on a person’s flesh. Sound scary? It did to me. But it also sounded amazing. To me, anatomy seemed …
“If you start feeling lightheaded or faint,” the surgeon told me in the operating room, “just don’t fall into the patient. You can fall anywhere else. Just not into the patient.” This was the first time I had ever shadowed a surgeon, and a dark cloud of fear started to cloak my feelings of excitement. I had never thought myself to be a queasy person, but suddenly I kept imagining myself plunging face-forward off of …
Author’s note: Mild spoilers ensue. “Call the doc.” Jeff Daniels, as a crime boss named Abe, utters the only explicit reference to a health care professional in director Rian Johnson’s film Looper, in which medicine plays a tiny but indelibly disgusting role. For the central conceit, criminal organizations in the future send captives back in time where hitmen called “loopers” shoot and kill them. The loopers live in a time period where there is no …
