Debra Nash
E 375L
People
Many have heard of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, one of the greatest detective novelists of all time. Largely unheard of are his beginnings as a doctor. I find it strange that anyone would willingly renounce what I consider to be the noblest profession in the world, especially by “tossing his handkerchief up in the air with a wild rush of joy in the realization that he should at last be his own master.”[1] Like me, Doyle was a person with one foot in the world of humanities and the other in the sciences. The difference in why he chose literature and why I choose medicine results from divergences in our patterns of conversion.
Sir Arthur and I had similar beginnings. We both attended strict English boarding schools that we detested. Sir Arthur began at nine years old and I at fifteen. We were zombies, “want-wit[s]” that had “much ado to know about [ourselves].”[2] Sir Arthur described himself as “wild, full blooded and a trifle reckless,”[3] rebelling at the brutal corporal discipline of Victorian schooling. To escape it, he invented fabulous stories. As for me, I was rebelling from being labeled. All my life, others had defined me as a ‘goodie goodie,’ someone who was brainy, boring, and perfectly pure. I couldn’t identify with this persona, but I didn’t know who I really was either. With reckless abandon, I engaged in external activities such as academics and boys and drunken parties in order to escape myself. I feared that if I looked inside, I would only find emptiness. Perhaps Doyle felt that the same.
After high school, I grew weary of my meaningless existence. At about the same time I started college, I decided to stop running away. Like Carlyle, “there rose a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me forever.”[4] While mine was a decision, Sir Arthur’s turning point was forced by responsibility. When Sir Arthur was at the age that I started college, his alcoholic father collapsed into severe dementia. Sir Arthur’s first task after leaving boarding school was to commit his father to a mental institution. This took tremendous resolve. Thus, by renouncing our fears, we were able to find the stuff of an individual inside. Within, I found not the emptiness I had dreaded, but despair over the world. Our world harbors the hypocrisy of self-righteous religious sects; the complacent, willful ignorance of the affluent; and the evil intent of those who would take advantage of a silly little girl. I no longer wanted to be that girl. Sir Arthur and I felt the same despair, albeit his was more personal, and we began looking deeper inside of ourselves for answers.
Doyle examined and
rejected his family traditions, whereas I began pondering my identity and place
in the world by tapping into my global background. Sir Arthur came from a background of artists,
but his father was certainly no role model as a man, let alone an artist. Therefore, when Dr. Bryan Charles Waller took
lodging in his house, Sir Arthur looked up to him, probably as a father figure,
and soon after went off to medical school.
My family traditions were not as unified as Sir Arthur’s. I inherited Scottish, Irish, German, and
Chinese blood; have lived in
Despite no longer feeling culturally lost, I still hunger to know more about people, because we remain such a wonderful mystery. “Feeling and loving the mystery”[5] has hammered me into the inquisitive, passionate person I am today, the person who delights in having open, intimate, one-on-one conversations with introverts, listening and observing the dynamics of a group, and watching and wondering about the lives of passersby and strangers. I have learned that people are more fantastical than any figment of the imagination. We are disparate in terms of shape and color and frame of mind, yet made of the same fluid, fiber, and feeling. We are conveniently available all over the world. I love people, flaws and all. Like Picasso towards his paintings [see picture,][6] nothing makes my eyes light up more than my fellow human beings.
My
impassioned love for people might have led to further despair over the
condition of the world and the universal suffering of mankind. However, the examples of others showed me how
to cope with adversity, just as Sir Arthur looked to his role models for
direction. As children, we were both
inspired by our mothers. Sir Arthur’s
mom raised her son single-handedly, managing to make ends meet while filling
his head with beautiful stories to obscure the meagerness of their reality. My
mom cared for me just as much. When I
was seven years old and living in
I was honored to
know many others like my mom who, in spite of their afflictions, live fuller
lives than most. My brother and I used
to have tea weekly with an elderly blind lady named Jean who lived down the
street from our high school dormitory. Her
full-blown congenital glaucoma didn’t stop her from having a family. Her grown-up children leaving home and her
husband passing away didn’t stop Jean from living without assistance. Her blindness and advanced age didn’t stop
her from going out, participating in a charity woman’s group, and attending my
graduation. In
Whereas I admired patients, Sir Arthur admired doctors. Either way, their passionate love of life and of others was infectious. Through their perseverance, they overcame suffering. I aspired to spread their boundless spirit and fight against suffering with the same attitude as theirs. Because of them, I realized that rather than dwelling on the evils of the world, it is more constructive to analyze my approach and what I can do as an individual for those around me who suffer. With medicine, I want to serve the people all over the world who in return are the source of my inspiration.
While I was a college freshman, Sir Arthur at that stage in his life was pegging away at his books in medical school. It was too late to cure his father of alcoholism and mental illness, but by becoming a doctor, Sir Arthur could hope to cure others of illness, so that they would not have to endure what his father did. This is the way I felt during an unusual high school field trip to an English museum. There, in contrast to the previous stirrings of life, I saw the stillness of death for the first time. People donated their bodies postmortem to Body Worlds, an exhibit where the remains were neatly sliced up, treated, then housed behind glass and velvet rope for the sake of public education. The most striking display was the unborn baby still inside its mother. Both had died in a car accident. I marveled at the beautiful intricacies of nature that gave life, while grieving that they were now frozen in death. By unearthing the secrets behind the machinery of life, my hope was to someday prevent others from dying needlessly.
In our early
twenties, Sir Arthur was further along his medical studies, while I was tying
together medical experience in and out of the classroom as a college premed. When volunteering at ER, I observed my
Sir
Arthur seemed just as infatuated with being a doctor. He finished medical school and even started
his own private practice. But he soon
had a change in mindset, after a near-death attack of influenza made it all too
clear that “le hommes sont tous condamnés
à mort avec des sursis indéfinis.”[8] This is the point when he tossed his
handkerchief, symbolizing the tossing of his medical career. His brush with death woke him to what he would
miss most about life, and it wasn’t medicine [see picture.] [9] Sir Arthur’s passion for story-telling proved
to be far greater. From then on he
devoted himself to writing, going on to create the legendary, well-beloved
Sherlock Holmes.
My change in mindset was less dramatic, but rapid and equally significant. With medicine in mind, I began college as a Biology premed major. I love the reassuring concreteness of science in its explanations of biological processes. Learning the origins of BSE and the enzymatic method of stonewashing jeans augmented my understanding of the world. The idea that all organisms are composed of the same basic building blocks connected me to the universe. The sciences are often useful, almost always fascinating, and completely necessary in order to examine how life works. Science gave meaning to the diseased organs I saw at Body Worlds. My sciences classes helped form a significant part of me, especially the areas that relate to medicine, such as genetic disorders, viral and bacterial agents of disease, the immune system, and the outcomes of nutritional deficiencies. However, the natural sciences feed only part of my curiosity about people. It does not examine people’s personal thoughts, feelings, and struggles: why we live. For those answers I had to look elsewhere. After a year without literature, I succumbed to my soul’s longings and switched majors to English premed.
Switching majors changed my personality. At the end of my freshmen year, the Myers-Briggs test described me as an eNTp, or an Inventor. I imagine Sir Arthur, with his logical thought processes and creative genius, to have that kind of archetype. In the course of two years, I have become an eNFp, the archetype of a Champion Idealist. My extroversion remained the same at around 3% preference, but everything else changed. My Intuition and Perception increased from a slight to moderate preference, and my decision-making changed completely from a slightly expressed Thinker at 4% to a distinctively expressed Feeler at 62%. The humanities had quickened my sympathetic imagination.
My transformation, in hindsight, is welcome, because it enhanced my passion and feeling for people. English majors studies people more than they study English itself. The English language is a vector for the expression of an individual’s sense of the suffering in their society and the human condition in general. English is the best major with which to analyze the essence of mankind prior to medical training, since doctors must “relate the modern results of natural science to man’s instinct for conduct, his instinct for beauty.”[10] I need my English major in order to labor ten years in medical school, stare down Death in the form of still bodies on sterile tables, and finally wage war against It for the rest of my days. As a “humanistically trained human being,”[11] I can give hope to patients as well as to myself in an environment constantly filled with pain.
One little Nicaraguan girl in particular showed me why doctors need a sympathetic imagination. This girl came in with her sick little brother and, despite being healthy, needed help just as much as he did. Their mother was the sole provider in the family, so the girl had to look after her brother most of the time, including missing school to bring him to our clinic. While he needed medicine and a lollipop, the girl needed encouragement that her mother had no time to give. We crossed cultural barriers by teaching each other words for our different languages and giggling over her crush on a boy in her English class. I gave her a hug and she gave me a smile and the pink ribbon in her hair. Now, whenever I see this ribbon, her smile returns to me, renewing my resolve to practice compassion always, as a human being and future doctor.
I wonder if Sir Arthur transformed from a Champion Idealist to an Inventor due to his extensive training of the left side of his brain. Like Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Doyle was “a master at observation, logic, deduction, and diagnosis.”[12] Like a detective solving crimes with clues obtained from suspects, a doctor diagnoses diseases with clues obtained from patients. A doctor uses the SOAP (Subjective Objective Analysis Plan) method to treat patients. First, he interviews the patient in order to obtain their histories, which is like a detective interviewing suspects and witnesses. Both doctor and detective obtain subjective information through these interviews. Second, the doctor performs a physical examination to obtain objective information. Any observations he makes of the patient’s physical appearance are included in this exam. Similarly, a detective searches the scene of the crime for physical evidence. Then the doctor and detective must reflect and analyze the clues that they have obtained thus far. The then doctor diagnoses the disease, while the detective identifies the criminal. Finally, the plan of action is how to treat the disease or how to catch the criminal. Doyle’s medical background was a key contributor to his literary genius in the detective novel genre.
Sir Arthur and I have combined the humanities and the sciences to suit different aims and outcomes. While Doyle used medicine to help him with literature, I hope to use literature to help me with medicine. Contrary to his belief that life after death is “the greatest and most glorious adventure of all,”[13] I believe life itself to be much more so. I’m ever ready because I know where I’m coming from and where I want to be. To my guide Passion, I say, “Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, lead Thou me on!”[14]
Word Count in P1A without quotes = 2057
Word Count in P1B without quotes = 2463
Quote words =147
Words added = 493
Words omitted = 87
Words omitted and added = 580
Location:
https://webspace.utexas.edu/dln254/E375L/People/People.htm?uniq=-h76xqb