Optimism and Despair

What drew me first to the world of medicine was the sense that stories were essential—even elemental—to the provision of patient care. The paradigmatic provider-patient exchange, that of taking a history, features doctors and their patients working together to weave a narrative, to make sense of pain, and to ultimately address somatic and psychological suffering. Thus in undergrad, before med school, I spent much of my time thinking about what stories we tell each other about how health care apparatuses developed and took shape, how different marginalized communities imagine and experience their relationship to medical institutions, how the American public at large makes sense of medical science and society.

One dominant narrative within this imaginary is that of the infallible doctor—physician not as frail, emotional, conflicted human but as extension of medical science itself, enacting healing in the name of logic, rationality, and algorithm, performed with the precision of a… Continue reading →