Dying was the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me by William Hablitzel

Author:William Hablitzel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sunshine Ridge Publishing
Published: 2011-01-06T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

The Wisdom of Medicine

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Wisdom begins in wonder.

Socrates

I

t is amazing how much thinking can be done in an elevator, particularly the elevators at the teaching hospital. In the time it takes to travel from the ground floor to the medical floor, Einstein could have furthered his theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. Too few elevators and too great a demand nourished impressive crowds within the lobby, crowds of people atypically patient, or perhaps deadened with resignation. It was the slowest part of my commute, one that seemed to get longer with each passing year.

Wedged into a corner of the elevator, I stood conspicuously protecting a box of doughnuts from a crushing fate. They were to be a peace offering for the medical team that awaited me many floors above, a tool of greeting and a reflection of my intention that the month to come would be a good one. Things hadn’t changed all that much since the time that I waited in that room as a new resident. The surest, if not the fastest, way into a medical student’s or resident’s heart was to feed them.

As the door opened and closed, I was lost in thought. Visions of my first ride in that very same elevator played out in my mind. They were images with an uncommon, if not disturbing, clarity. They were images of a young man both excited and frightened by his new role as a resident physician—eager to serve, impatient to learn, and humbled by the responsibility that lay ahead.

Now, some two decades later, the responsibility that awaited still humbled me. For the next month, I would be the attending physician on a medical ward team. It would be a large team, made up of a student pharmacist, junior and senior medical students, several interns, and a supervising resident. For the next month, I would be responsible for their education, their professional development, their welfare, and the care that they would provide to their patients. The job had changed little over the years, and I had done it so many times that it had almost become routine. But I had changed, and the way that I practiced medicine had changed with me. While the way I taught had surely changed as well, at times I was aware of a soft voice from deep within me that suggested that, perhaps, I hadn’t changed enough. Usually I heard that voice during times of quiet and reflection; I wasn’t expecting to hear it so clearly in that crowded, noisy elevator.

Few professions savor tradition with more fervor than medicine. The Hippocratic oath is still recited at medical school graduations, and despite the technological advances, the training of new physicians has changed surprisingly little through the eons. Medical education is a very hierarchal system in which each level of experience, from medical student to attending physician, imparts knowledge to the ones below. With the flow of knowledge comes the love of and comfort with the status quo and the perpetuation of tradition.

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