Student Voice: Areas of Concentration
"During my surgery rotation there was a woman who had just been
diagnosed with terminal cancer," remembers fourth-year medical student
Emily Baldwin. "She was 29 and I was 32 and I was so distraught that
I needed to do something for myself in order to go back the next day to
talk to her - so I wrote down her story."
As a result, when she was ready to select her Area of Concentration,
Emily was drawn to the Medical Humanities track, in which students participate
in a month-long core course entitled "Imagining the Body." It
explores the historical, cultural, and technological ways that healthy
and diseased bodies have been portrayed, subjected to investigation, and
understood.
Student research projects in the humanities are broadly defined, including
history of medicine, creative writing, religious studies, the performing
arts, photojournalism, and documentary filmmaking. Recent student projects
include narrative essays about patients' experiences of rural health care,
and writing about experiences working with dying patients in narrative
and poetic forms.
"Writing about medicine while learning medicine gives me the chance
to reflect on what it means," says Emily. "Schools want to teach
students how to be empathetic," she adds, "and we get talked
to a lot about empathy. But rather than saying here's how to be empathic,
writing helps us reconnect with why we came to medical school in the first
place."
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