Beyond the White Coat Ceremony

Note from Anna B. Reisman, Co-Director, Yale Internal Medicine Residency Writers’ Workshop, Assistant Professor, Department of Internal Medicine, Yale University School of Medicine and VA Connecticut Health Care System: This issue inaugurates a new feature: selected writings from the Yale Internal Medicine Residency Program’s Writers’ Workshop. The annual workshop began in 2003. Abraham Verghese and Richard Selzer, among the best known physician-writers in the United States, have served as workshop leaders, teaching the craft of writing to more than 35 residents. In designing the workshop with my co-director, Dr. Asghar Rastegar, our aim was to make participants better physicians by providing a creative outlet for reflection. The tempo of a resident’s day is typically furious — one patient dies, perhaps, another sickens, a third refuses a necessary procedure, a fourth’s wife cries inconsolably at the bedside — with no time in between to ponder what happened, much less what it meant to the patient or to the resident and how it might shape the way the resident practices medicine in the future. Without time to muse about the experience, many residents take the easy road: They emotionally detach. Writing, we believe, can be an antidote to this tendency. The exercise of writing not only makes us empathic; it also sharpens our diagnostic skills. One of the keys to compelling writing is attention to detail: the nervous twitch of an old man’s eye muscles or the decayed front teeth of a young woman, a former crack addict. Such details not only make our writing come alive but also sensitize us to our patients’ plights and sharpen our diagnostic skills. The stories and essays written by the Writers’ Workshop participants present a range of experiences, real and imagined, and take us deep into the minds of young doctors trying to make sense of what they do.