The Mother of the Beast

Editor’s Note: This post is one of two pieces on the Introduction to Social Medicine and Global Health course at Harvard Medical School. Read the other piece here.
By: Benjamin Oldfield, MD, a fourth-year resident in the urban health-focused combined internal medicine-pediatrics residency program at Johns Hopkins Hospital
When asked about my medical school experience, I like to map my memories onto the arc of an epic poem. Both are lengthy, traversing vast ground, formative—the allegory seems to fit. First-year began in medias res, in the middle of things, as epics tend to do. Like the horrific storm at the beginning of Vergil’s Aeneid, a tumultuous splash of cadaveric parenchyma saturated my first months at Harvard Medical School.
The trials and tribulations mounted from there. Often, epic heroes find themselves faced with challenges they never expected, for which they don’t feel equipped. Consider Beowulf. The hero, after destroying Grendel, next must defeat Grendel’s mother in a battle at the bottom of a lake. There, Beowulf’s armor and sword initially present more of a burden than an advantage. The metal weighs him down. Again, the medical training–epic poem allegory holds. If poor health was the beast we as medical students were training to fight, we had to ask ourselves about the underlying determinants of disease. That is, what is the mother of disease? And what skills do we need to combat her? Questions like these left this neophyte submerged and sin...

Source: Academic Medicine Blog - January 26, 2016 Category: Universities & Medical Training Authors: Guest Author Tags: Featured Trainee Perspective global health health disparities patient centered care patient's story social determinants of health social history social medicine Source Type: blogs