Isabelle Lomax-Sawyers
The day I flew to Dunedin to begin my first year studies in the health sciences, my wonderful best friend came to Wellington airport to see me off and gave me an article he’d been nagging me to read for ages. It was Leslie Jamison’s essay The Empathy Exams. In it, Jamison explores the complexities of giving and receiving empathy through stories of her experiences as a medical actor playing a standardised patient, and as a patient herself. It turns out my best friend was right, of course; I read the whole essay twice through on the plane, and so began my love affair with medical creative writing.
The living room was a riot of freshly picked forget-me-nots. Every corner of the room was filled with vases and bottles, the little blue flowers exploding everywhere. In the middle of the room the usual furniture had been pushed back or taken away. A coffin, occupied, lay there, with two hardback chairs facing it. Made of walnut, the box was simple and unadorned. The deceased lay in state. The body was wearing a midnight blue dress, white face so pale against the dark surrounding it. A small bouquet of forget-me-nots was clutched in cold, stiff hands.
For hundreds of years doctors have been placed on a pedestal, achieving a form of celebrity and authority over the lay person. Only doctors, went the logic, understood the confusing puzzle that is the human body. Only doctors could translate its strange signs and symptoms into a language that made sense. This attitude gave rise to paternalistic medicine, a system that implies that an individual’s healthcare is the sole responsibility of the physician. Paternalistic medicine gives the physician the power to make whatever decision they think is in the patient’s best interests, regardless of the actual capacity or desires of the patient.
For any medical student, there’s something quite hard to forget about walking into the anatomy lab for the very first time. My shoes squeaked against the blue linoleum floor as I wove my way through rows of grey body bags lying on stainless steel trolleys under that harsh fluorescent white light. What I found challenging about my first encounter with a corpse was that it was so undeniably and certainly human. Structurally there was not much difference between me and the body that lay on the trolley.
