A four-chambered love machine

After a long day of research I will be spending tonight with my one true love (my dog Indie), on the couch, eating ice cream, and watching "House of Cards". Bliss... Below is a little something I wrote for the History of Medicine course I'm taking this month. The story at the end is something I'd like to expand on in the future. Let me know what you think/if you have any similar stories of your own.

Nerd Romance

Reading the first few chapters of Roy Porter's "The Greatest Benefit to Mankind" was a very frustrating experience for me. As I learned about ancient theories of disease and rudimentary models of the human body, I couldn't help but feel exasperated, as well as a little bit smug. These historical perspectives seemed absolutely absurd, but then again I was interpreting them through my own perspective - that of a 21st century medical student, who is three months away from graduation, and about to benefit from 3,000+ years of scientific exploration that I did not participate in myself. 

I tried imaging what it would be like to explain a contagious disease without knowing about bacteria and viruses. What on earth would I have come up with? Any ten-year-old with an iPad could probably tell you how the heart is a pump that circulates blood to the lungs for oxygenation and then throughout the entire body. But the first doctor to propose that fundamental theory in 1553 was burned at the stake for heresy.

The start of Porter’s book has strengthened my appreciation for how far medicine has come since it began, and it has also made me question the validity of my own educational process. Big leaps in medical knowledge were made when someone questioned the system. Harvey overturned the much-ingrained concept of Galenic physiology through his commitment to the basic scientific process – propose a hypothesis and then carry out an experiment to test that hypothesis. This, to me, represents real learning. Real learning is about asking questions, exploration, trial and error.

How much of that have I done the past three and a half years? Unless you are involved in research, much of today’s medical school curriculum is based on rote memorization. Even anatomy, which becomes a more bare-boned subject each year, involves identifying a detailed list of structures, all of them already named, with each normal variant carefully catalogued away in a massive atlas, perched on some dusty bookshelf somewhere…

In a world where new scientific discoveries are made daily, what modern fundamentals will be proven obsolete during our lifetime? From this perspective, I understand the push to cultivate more physician-scientists. Medicine has to keep up with the research realm if it wants to preserve the characteristics that make it more than just another field of science.

Medicine is more than just memorization (though getting one’s MD does require quite a bit of that). A doctor should have the skills to heal the human body, but a doctor should also, (at the risk of sounding like I’ve been at Loyola too long), be able to treat the human spirit. When our ancestors proposed that energy lives in the liver and that sickness is caused by evil ghosts, maybe they were trying to address the spiritual aspect of medicine – the part that doesn’t have an anatomical name or an official diagnosis.

On my psychiatry rotation last year, we were consulted on a heart transplant patient with a history of depression. The patient was actually doing pretty well – he just needed a medication check – but he told us about life with his new heart. He joked and said, “now somebody else loves my wife.” His comment really stuck with me. Why do we feel heartbreak on the left side of our chest? What about those gut feelings that help us make decisions? (I’m assuming the billions of bacteria that live in our intestines aren't whispering us advice.)

I’m excited to learn more about the history of medicine, especially as it pertains to oncology, but I think that there will always be some aspects of the human body and the human condition that we can’t really explain. Maybe one day someone very smart will figure it out, but for now it remains just another mystery to be explored.