I'm Really Back at Stanford

There are some things that strike me as very "Stanford." During orientation, we were invited to internal medicine's grand rounds and the speaker was Anna Deavere Smith, a professor of the drama department at Stanford for a decade before she went to NYU. Now, she's going around the country performing a play called "Let Me Down Easy." She's a recipient of the MacArthur "genius" grant, nominee for the Pulitzer Prize and two Tony awards, and winner of numerous other awards. Only Stanford would invite someone completely outside of medicine yet utterly amazing to be at medicine grand rounds (UCSF did have a narrative medicine speaker Rita Charon, but she was an MD).

It was amazing. She performed from two plays which were constructed from interviews. She took on the persona, voice, mannerisms, and words of the people she interviewed including patients, medical students, residents, and professors like Dr. Watson (of DNA fame). It was poignant, hilarious, moving, and breathtaking all at once. Although we were in Braun auditorium where I had my first class at Stanford (Chem31), it became a theater with the beauty of her performance.

I think this generation of medical students is most in tune with the patient experience of health care. We haven't become jaded or exhausted or angry; we empathize with patients, we are the recipients of a new movement to teach us to be compassionate, patient-centered advocates. But this grand rounds taught me way more than anything else. She portrayed a Texas governor's feelings about alternative medicine and cancer, a privileged practitioner's emotions at Charity hospital after Hurricane Katrina, an appalled medical student working with a rude resident, an orphanage director who took care of dying children. These performances by a master actress drew tears. I thoroughly enjoyed it and found it to be not only a reminder but a beautiful lesson in approaching patients as whole persons.