I come from a family of doctors. I grew up in clinics around Saudi Arabia, New York City, Columbus and India. My uncle is the editor in chief of one of the most popular cytopathology journals in the nation, and my dad had experience with a (failed!) medical startup in India. As a result, I have always felt a kind of special connection with medicine and the medical world.
Yet growing up in clinics doesn’t mean that I feel well suited for medicine. I always saw myself as a person that prided practical action, efficiency and innovation above more ambiguous things like intellectual patience and empathy. My heroes to this day are not medical innovators or great empathizers, but intellectual powerhouses that were also unrelenting men or women of action: Teddy Roosevelt, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Leonardo da Vinci. I don’t think I am alone at this school or this generation in sharing this bias.
Yet I hear over and over again that medicine is for the most part not about the clinical or basic sciences or about innovation or precision or practical action. Certainly, some competence is required. Some intellect is needed. But above it all lays the cloud of patience and empathy.
From a historical perspective, this makes some sense. Think about where medicine started: it was initially embodied as a tribal medicine man—an otherworldly entity that stayed at the intersection of the world and the spirit. For a long time, medicine was in the hands of theology and practiced by a doctor that was also in some senses a priest. Only in the last couple centuries have the church and the hospital split, and only in the last decades has medicine started to display quantitative colors.
Even in this modern era, I realize that patients don’t want engineers or “men of action” as their family physicians. They want patient, humble doctors that can adopt their worldview, know them deeply and comfort them in 10,000 different situations. A great doctor’s career is to be filled with nights of waiting by a bedside, adjusting the ventilator of a dying man so that he may go in peace. It is filled with inane paperwork and comforting anxious parents that call with an hourly update on their newborn. His life is spent dealing with these situations in an effort to understand the people he serves. This is a life of great nobility and public service.
Yet I cannot imagine myself living as this legend of the “great family doctor,” as much as I respect the ideal. Unfortunately, I am too ironic, impatient and energetic to live with such nobility. For a long time, I thought that this meant a permanent break from the profession of my ancestors. Yet I have returned again and again to medicine. Through all my doubting, I knew that there was still something deeply amazing about having intimate knowledge of the collection of cells that I live in. There is something to the power of healing that appeals to this engineer.
Besides these facts, I see something more: a technical revolution in the treatment of the ailing. I can imagine futures where patients visit doctors because their cell group CXS345 has been acting up, and they want a new strain; where deadly cancers are avoided by daily digital checkups in protein levels and cell replication rates; perhaps even a place where death is a thing of the past.
This place, I know, is a long way away. It has a myriad of philosophical complications and ethical concerns. But this will be my turf in the wide swath of human action and intellect. I want to help this vision appear with my work on this earth—my work to perfect the eternal craft of medicine.
Hopefully, this school can get me started.
To tell Aaditya he made a horrible career choice, send him a note at [email protected].