SFMS

I have a short article in the July/August 2008 issue of the San Francisco Medical Society (SFMS) Magazine. This came as a surprise. One of my FPC leaders convinced me months ago to write something, and apparently it made it into the latest issue. I completely forgot I wrote it and when one of my friends called to say her mom liked my article, I was flabbergasted. Here's a copy of the article; I'm not completely satisfied with it, but I never am with my writing.

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From the SF Medical Society Magazine, July/August 2008.

Medicine as Muse
Craig Chen

As I begin my third year of medical school, I am bombarded by the wealth of stories on the wards. I journal my own struggle of adjusting to medicine outside the classroom, listen to patients recount captivating narratives, and weave a tale out of each history of present illness. This transition into active participation in the hospital rather than passive lecture learning has jump-started my imagination and motivation for creative writing.

As medical students, we have developed a keen intuition about when to jot down an attending’s clinical pearls of wisdom. The writers among us have simply transferred that instinct to identifying images, metaphors, emotions, and phrases that may trigger a story or poem. At the end of each day, I clean out the overfilled pockets of my white coat, and among the debris of the tuning fork and pocket pharmacopoeia, I find a note card jotted with ideas. Just yesterday, I had scribbled “organ donor asked how long for liver to regenerate; didn’t Promethius’s [sic] liver regen overnight?” With Greek mythology in mind, I realized that this campus sits on Parnassus, home to the muses, and the informatics system at UCSF is named after the Greek physician Galen. This juxtaposition of classical and contemporary medicine begged for a poem.

The ideas are replete, but finding time is the constant struggle. My interest in creative writing blossomed when I took workshops with Stanford University Stegner Fellows as an undergraduate. One of my writing mentors told me that it is easy to be a student who writes, but it is much harder to be a writer who’s also a student. To practice this art of the pen, I commit a block of time each day to writing. Whether it is reflection on topics from Grand Rounds on my daily blog or a sketch of a poem about going to a reservation with the Indian Health Service or a revision of a completely fictional short story, I force myself to craft something every day.

The greatest inspiration and motivation, however, come from my peers and physician-writers in the Bay Area community. Through remarkable vision and leadership, my classmate Mel Hayes organized a group of students who find writing the ideal vehicle for expression. Our hodgepodge collection of playwrights, creative nonfiction writers, poets, essayists, and storytellers has grown over the last two years; while it began as a handful of students gathering at cafes and apartments, it soon piqued the interest of many, from incoming first years to fourth years completing an area of concentration in the medical humanities.

Amazingly, faculty members were eager to support our budding writer’s group. Dr. David Watts, author of Bedside Manners, invited us to his office on Monday evenings to workshop our stories, prompt our imaginations, and discuss the nuances of narrative. Dr. Louise Aronson, whose short fiction has won national literary awards, organized an elective to formally recognize our time and work in narrative medicine. Even community writers such as Bill Hayes (The Anatomist; Five Quarts; Sleep Demons) join us in exploring both fiction and nonfiction as mediums for play and communication.

I’ve often had the skeptic ask me, “How can you possibly find time as a medical student starting on the wards to do any writing?” I make time to write because it’s fun. It’s therapeutic. Journaling is a way to debrief and reflect on that poor patient interaction, that frustrated staff member, that terrifying moment in the emergency department. Short stories allow me to experience situations from other perspectives, to think about how a patient interprets my actions, to listen to a family member interpreting. Poems help me capture a feeling, follow a curious train of thought, ask questions without expecting answers. Writing has value to me as well as those audiences who stumble upon my work.

This combination of writing and medicine is not new. All of us recognize that perennial symbol of medicine, the Rod of Asclepius, and most of us know the eponym refers to the Greek god of medicine. But few, I suspect, know that Asclepius is the son of Apollo, the patron god of music and poetry and the leader of the muses. The original classical Hippocratic Oath begins by invoking both Asclepius and Apollo. From afar, poetry and medicine seem to be discordant disciplines, representing the fuzzy humanities and the objective sciences. But as I enter this phase of my medical training, learning more the art than the science of medicine, I realize the Greeks might have gotten it right after all; that writing, like medicine, seeks to characterize and palliate the human experience.