Ditch Doc

Observe the newest category, being a listing of those bastions of the faith where a young Catholic can still launch out on the high adventure of liberal education.

Last year’s prayer service for those who had donated their bodies to the anatomy department was really quite tasteful. I’m always impressed when a quasi-liturgical function with little foundation in tradition is carried off well. Had my grandfather’s name been one of those on the list, I would have thought him well-treated. But one of the speakers left me with a whole new set of questions about “multi-faith” prayer.

A little background: with one or two possible exceptions, all eighty or so donors had very western names. I would be mildly surprised to find anyone on the list not falling into the religious categories “Christian” and “N/A”. And yet this speaker found it necessary to mention as many sects as she could think of, from Islam to Buddhism with stops at Catholicism and something like new-age. It was manifestly not for the benefit of the donors or their families, or even herself. So what was the point? I’ve come up with a couple of hypotheses:

1. She’s used to talking to more mixed audiences. This theory’s boring, so on to the next one.

2. She feels that a service for the dead has to involve prayer. She also feels that in an academic gathering, there is no room for any mention of God. So the best choice is to have prayer, but make it so pluralist that no one suspects you of taking it seriously. Some will think you’re being profound, some will roll their eyes, but anything’s better than making claims of truth you might have to defend later.

This hypothesis feels a bit superficial too, but I can’t come up with a better one. Takers?

The prayer service for those who donated their bodies to the anatomy department this year was held yesterday. All the donors’ names were read, and every few names a student presented a brief meditation. Here was mine:

“Perhaps it is fitting that every aspiring doctor, at the beginning of his career, is forced to contemplate its end. On the day we received our white coats, we pledged our lives to medicine, to the maintenance and preservation of human health. It was a heady day. Not long after, in the anatomy laboratory, we looked down at the most unsettling basic fact of medicine: no matter how cleverly we outwit death, or how long we hide our patients from his gaze, though we might snatch a thousand years out of his hands, all of our patients, and all of us, will end in the grave. Faced with death, we are forced to ask: what does life mean?

“These donors offer us an answer. This man on the table in front of me, whose name I do not know, loved his neighbours, loved me, so much that he submitted his body to the ignominy of my scalpel, so that I might learn from him how to treat my patients. His sacrifice demands another. To be loyal to this man’s gift, I must take his example and give my own life to those I treat.

“But what can I do for him? Is there anything we can do for those who have gone before? Our very presence at this prayer service proclaims our confident hope that there is. Though his body has been of use to me, I can be of use to his soul. Wherever I go in my medical career, I will keep his memory with me and pray that God might give him what medicine could not: life everlasting. Goodnight, sweet prince, flights of angels sing thee to thy rest, and until we meet again, may you enjoy the reward of your generosity. You are in my prayers.”

Apparently, we’ve also just discovered that childhood development is important. The previous idea was, of course, that children were just small, unready adults, to be seen and not heard, and to be shuffled off to the nanny or the boarding school as soon as possible. You couldn’t really do much with children below a certain age. But are we really saying that? This sort of thinking has certainly prevailed in some social classes at some times, but even the reference to nannies and boarding schools proves that we’re making generalizations from a pretty specific population. Are we suggesting that there were no mothers who bounced their babies and cooed at them? No fathers who chased their sons around the park? No fairy tales? No toys? Surely some of the aristocrats above would have tried to choose nannies who knew how to raise children, and not just small unready adults. So where did we get the idea that we’re just discovering these things? Is it that we’ve just started to write about them in the form of research papers? If anyone has any other ideas, I’d love to hear them.

If the redundancy of that title made you wince, read on. All of our profs have informed us that the need to treat patients as people, and not just disease receptacles, was largely forgotten with the widespread application of modern scientific discoveries to the practice of medicine. After cranking out a century’s worth of the sort of soulless doctors we’ve all encountered at one time or another, medical schools are finally taking steps to remind students of the inescapably personal nature of their profession. The expression for this new way of thinking is “patient-centred medicine.” It may be redundant, but it’s a step in the right direction. There’s still something missing, though. To be continued…

So there’s this idea that if you admit to being religious, you won’t get into med school. I don’t think I’m the only one who’s ever had this idea, but I have recently had the pleasure of having it entirely disproven. God not only came up, but was a major discussion point in my interviews with two of the three schools that offered me spots. One board even got me going for several minutes on the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. Tell you what to avoid though: there was only one interview that covered abortion. And there was only one school that turned me down outright after the interview.

Here’s a line from my textbook:

“By now you have learned from probability theory that we can never be certain about anything.”

Two MCAT’s: $600

Gas, bus tickets, motel and Red Bull for MCAT’s: $720

Application fees: $755

Fort Nelson to Fort St. John to Halifax to Vancouver to Edmonton to Fort Nelson to Fort St. John to London to Kingston to New York to Fort St. John to Fort Nelson: $2735.20

“Dear Mr. Turner, I’m very pleased to let you know…”: Priceless

When I interviewed at Dalhousie, I had somehow managed to be one of 50 applicants from a pool of 400 who interviewed for 9 out-of-province spots. With stats like that, Dal gets to pick the absolute cream of the out-of-province crop, and for the whole weekend, I didn’t meet a single person besides myself who wasn’t either working on or in possession of an M.Sc. or a Ph.D. It seemed like everyone had done AIDS work in Africa, or at least putzed around South-East Asia on a motorbike. What’s hardest to believe, they were mostly articulate, funny people with wide interests and good taste in beer. I don’t recall ever having been so humbled.

At Queen’s, we got a campus tour, provided by a couple of first year meds. Here’s how it started:

Student 1: Uhh… Here are some pretty buildings… That one’s the theology building…

Student 2: Wait, theology’s, like, religion studies, right?

S1: Well… Um… It’s part of the arts faculty…

Revelation: “Did I interview better than you two? Yes I did.” I hope they thought I was smiling at the pretty buildings.

So having filed an application for the medical program at UBC, how long would one have to wait before attending class, assuming one got accepted on the first attempt? Is it:

a) Long enough to give notice at your current job,

b) Long enough to take an extended holiday to Europe,

c) Long enough to take another semester of classes, or

d) Long enough for a pair of blue whales to conceive and bear a healthy calf.

I’ll give you a hint. It’s not a time marker likely to have much relevance to this particular applicant.