[~2012; I’ll post the rest when I find it]
My first day, not sure where to wait, I found myself in a slow holding pattern in a maze of hallways laid out in square patterns all leading back to lounge areas that seemed deliberately designed to not be used. Paintings on the wall of over-suited, overly-serious-looking men who, I could only infer, were some kind of warrior philosophers that had won some grand war in the past armed against the enemy with nothing but with sternness, red ties and white facial hair. In retrospect, it strikes me as a wannabe military institution alternating the use of laboratory coats and business suits as their uniforms.
In a few months, the new school would finish and we would be the first class to use it but for now we had to take our classes in the old facility. Old drawings from the dark ages depicting attempts at anatomical dissections from over a century ago plastered the walls. Surely this wasn’t some inconceivable feat, right? To sketch out human anatomy? Surely we had progressed so far past that that we didn’t possess memories of those times anymore. Right? Perhaps that was the point. That we weren’t that far away from more primitive times. But I couldn’t pick up any sense of self-awareness of this in the décor or culture.
Busts of old, white men with trimmed facial hair. Windowless halls. Stuffy, almost yellowing atmosphere. This is the cult you now find yourself indoctrinated (pun subconsciously intended) in. Congrats.
Just horrifying.
The new technology and new school wasn’t without impact. Facebook-circulated articles recounting the dripping sentimentality of doctors-to-be (note, they could never call them post-pre-meds) about the personal harrowing but ultimately deep-wisdom-accruing stories of navigating some interaction in a clinic as if no one else had ever dealt with another human being within an interaction structure before. You never read articles about the daunting first days of someone’s service to society’s cashier needs. The vaunted mercantile system, hundreds of years old, a sacred bond between currency and nourishing food, the portal guarded by the consistent hand on the food items and cash register.
So self-reinforced this culture was, any crack I would make (I had to try a couple times) about having 3rd world diseases coughed onto the ties we were forced to wear or the glamour of having done several rectal exams that day, would be met by an almost indignant refusal to acknowledge the nature of our tasks replaced by an acknowledgement of the difficulty of our saintly position. Perhaps I had grown up with an environment more accommodating of gallow’s humor. I think my ability to spin a self-aggrandizing narrative is fairly robust so I can’t imagine it was a failure to maintain an illusion but rather a refusal to do it on some level.
Besides the facilities and facebook articles, there was a nod to modernity in the form of a brand new curriculum concept ripping its way through the medical school. Prepare yourself. EBM. Evidence based medicine, is what it stood for. Not much more to the concept than what the name already covers in case you’re wondering or even assuming. The idea that we ought to have evidence backing up medical decisions.
I told you to prepare yourself. Keep in mind, I graduated in 2008, couple decades into the age of the Internet and nearly a decade after the Human Genome Project. This was a top ten ranked medical school that was considered fairly progressive having, at least in my class, admitted more females than males with age ranges from teens to their fifties (I was the teen). I would like to think in retrospect that I was surprised that a concept like that would even warrant an acronym, much less a curriculum, but by then, things like that ceased to surprise me. In fact, there was probably some relief that someone had said something like that out loud. It was a progress of a tiny, but barely measurable kind.
Omar Claflin 