The Last Visit.

I am sitting here in my last hotel room of interview season. It is a stressful time in some ways. But it has become significantly less stressful in others. I have to decide how I want to spend my next five years. And I have the added bonus of deciding for both myself and my significant other, who is supportive to the nth degree. It's difficult to determine what is most important: training program, quality of training, breadth, location, facilities, educational program, research opportunities.

And it is even harder to decide now. Because right now, all that I can think is, "Oh my goodness, I'm so glad it's over."

It's true. I'm going to have to rank the programs that I have visited. I'm going to have to decide if I want to be a masochist and triple board (peds/psych/child psych), or be a Yankee and double-board (combined psych/child psych), or enter a categorical psychiatry program somewhere between Honolulu and Massachusetts and go through this whole process again in three or four years.

But at least, then, it'll be out of my hands. The mystical computer system will tell me where I am going to be, and that will be that.

I'm going to submit my rank list here in a few days.

* * * * *

I was speaking with a fellow fourth year medical student about how the medical education process in many ways destroys the love of learning and the educational process. I am taking two longitudinal weekly night classes to make up for my unanticipated month of interviewing in December that have helped to remind me of the joy I used to have in the classroom setting.

"The History of American Medicine" is being taught by a history professor who is driving in from Memphis every other week for the course. She has such enthusiasm about the topic that it is hard to not love it with her. I have learned the origins of the term "mesmerized" and noted the odd anatomical drawings published by Vesalius in De Humani Corporis Fabrica.





























Yes, in the second picture, the man is holding his own skin. I tried to find the particularly disturbing image of a man holding his own intestines while smiling, but alas, I was unsuccessful.

My other new class of the semester is "Medicine through Literature". This promises to be an interesting course. It reminds me of the occasional intimate classes of undergrad, where class participation is required while we discuss how we critically analyze poetry and other such literary works. I may have gotten into a bit of a disagreement with the literature professor. But I hold by my stance that "correct" interpretations of poetry do not exist -- that it says just as much about how an individual interprets a poem as the actual poem (and author's intent) itself.

It may be a fun end to medical school.