Bloodletting And Miraculous Cures Character Analysis

The medical field is a career path that brings about many options and opportunities of great value. The noble idea of being a doctor tends to cloud the diligent studying and precise training that is actually required for this career. I have wanted to become a doctor since a very young age, and now that the opportunity is here for the taking, I have fully researched what it takes to succeed in this profession and various specialties of the practice. The road to a medical degree is one filled with thousands of notes, years of schooling, and many stressful nights, but the reward is one incomparable to any other. Saving people’s lives on a day-to-day basis has been one of my dreams for as long as I can remember, so the rigorous curriculum

Prominently featured in the mission statements of virtually of every medical school and medical institution in the world is the call for empathetic doctors. These institutions wish to train medical professionals that possess qualities of sympathy and compassion, and hospitals wish to employ health professionals that showcase similar qualities. The reality, however, is starkly different, as physicians, jaded by what they have seen in the medical world, lose the qualities that drove them to medicine in the first place. In Frank Huyler’s “The Blood of Strangers,” a collection of short stories from his time as a physician in the emergency room, Huyler uses the literary techniques of irony and imagery to depict the reality of the world of a medical professional. While Huyler provides several examples of both techniques in his accounts, moments from “A Difference of Opinion” and “The Secret” in particular stand out. Huyler uses irony and imagery in these two pieces to describe how medical professionals have lost their sense of compassion and empathy due to being jaded and desensitized by the awful incidents they have witnessed during their careers.

When authors write medical narratives, they have to play the role of a doctor by using metaphors to explain to the readers what is happening to the

In the essay Defending My Life, author Geov Parrish tells the narrative of his personal experience with the medical field and healthcare industry regarding life-saving organ transplants in which he underwent. Throughout his narrative he brings up many key issues present in current day medicine that relate well to our BEST medical curriculum. The first issue involves behaviorial aspects of medicine and the importance of the patient’s perspective in care. The next issue involves the social and ethical dilemmas relating to the cost of healthcare and adequate access to proper care.

3. In the practice of medicine, we have the amazing privilege to not only help our patients, but also to learn from them in very unexpected ways. Read the following 2 essays, written recently by students at the University Of Florida College Of Medicine. In the first, a student had a major impact on a young patient on the pediatric surgery service. In the second, the student describes her care for a noncompliant patient. Both made a difference in their patients and both changed and grew through the experience. Pick one, and describe the skills of the author that you notice and think are helpful, then describe how one or both of these stories relate to the kind of physician that you want to be.

Goodman first discusses the competition pre-med students endure with great detail using allusion, metaphors, and repetition. She first notes Chem 20’s “Olympian anguish and Olympic competitiveness.” She uses this allusion to the Olympics in order to fully express exactly how competitive the class was by comparing it to a highly selective competition that takes years to train for. This stresses to the audience the high-pressure and nerve-racking expectations of student success in the class. Goodman then emphasizes this concept by repeating the phrase “go through...competing…” in order to convey the never-ending competition that pre-med students are in their entire lives. To the audience, this displays a sense of repetitiveness and routine in doctors’ lives. Goodman extends this beyond college by comparing the world to “a ladder to be climbed”. This metaphor exemplifies a doctor’s constant need for self-fulfillment. Goodman does this to show to the audience that the competition does not end when Chem 20 is over.

William Osler once said “Medicine is the science of uncertainty and the art of probability.” While this quote was said nearly one-hundred years ago, it still holds the same weight as is once did. In Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam, this quote is shown to not only be true in regards to medicine, but also for people as a whole; even so there are many factors that contribute to a person’s personality early on that can be traced to decisions and personality traits later in their lives. One of these factors is the amount of interaction and influence a person’s family has with them. In Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, there are two extreme examples

Selzer’s The Exact Location of the Soul captures the essence of being a physician by using first person point of view, a series of personal anecdotes, and such striking imagery.

Medicine is a science of healing, but also an art. It takes intelligence in the sciences as well as precise skill in the art of medicine to heal successfully. In the Hippocratic Oath, Hippocrates highlights the importance of passing on the tradition of practicing medicine, maintaining respect for patients, and preserving humility within themselves. Modern day practice of this oath involve patient’s stories. Rita Charon in her article “What to do with Stories? The sciences of Narrative Medicine,” explores narrative writing and how to use it as a tool in healing patients. While Charon focuses on the writing of these stories, Atul Gawande’s book Being Mortal reflects on how to make more meaningful endings out of the stories of patients who

Mr. Zhao taught about the human body with such zeal and overwhelming passion, it encompassed me from day one. Though I had already planned on a being a pediatrician because I loved to care for kids, Mr. Zhao made actual medicine in relation to the human body another aspect of a health career to explore and love. You’re probably thinking, “Well yeah, you can’t just like people in the healthcare industry”, yet patient care, compassion, and sympathy play a definitive role in such a field. I’ve witnessed these elements of healthcare first-hand volunteering at Texas Children’s Hospital. I volunteered during the summer and do so now during the school year.

Pearson fixates her memoir on several different instances of medical mishaps that have happened in her career. For instance, she talks about the tragic death of her patient Mr. Rose. This patient provides Dr. Pearson with a life lesson that it is important to cherish the things you have then the things you wish you had. In this case, Dr. Pearson regrets cherishing the remaining time she had with Mr. Rose before he passes away. Another instance she learns a life lesson would be with her patient Elias, a young boy diagnosed with brain cancer. Even though Elias was slowly dying, his parents continued surgical procedures and heavily depended on the hospital staff to create a miracle. Dr. Pearson knew that Elias would not be able to recover, but she continued to assist through the surgeries as her “hands were tied”. Nevertheless, Dr. Pearson reflects that she could have put down her surgical tools and said no; instead, she participated in the surgeries. Later, Dr. Pearson realizes that her role and her identity as a doctor is to help her patients with their problems and to try to solve them as much as she can in a humane and respectable

While the novel most explicitly questions the power of physicians in its dramatic organ theft plot, Cook weaves this theme throughout the details of the text, beginning with the opening pages. The exacting nature of Cook’s prose offers a mirror for the highly controlled medical environment:

The doctor and his patient portray a troubled encounter that is subject to discussion. This short story reflects real or plausible issues comparable in real life. One example of such an event in Brooklyn when a construction worker filed a lawsuit against a hospital for subjecting him to a rectal exam against his wishes. According to his lawyer, the man begged,”please don’t do that’’ as he was held down, and he punched one of the doctors before being sedated and examined without consent. As a result the man allegedly developed post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the experience.(Tsai,1) Given to the poor man’s circumstance and how the medical professionals treated him, you can now see how unfit doctors can be to their own patients.

Therefore, teaching humanism is central to medical education because knowing how to care and work with humans is central to medical care. One of the ways in which this could be achieved is to incorporate the use of narratives in medical education. Medical students should learn to listen to the narratives of their patients in order to create empathy and take an accurate medical history, like the best doctors do. However, narratives should not only be used in a doctor-patient relationship, but colleagues should be encouraged to share their narratives, as well as to listen to the narratives of their mentors. Through the use of narratives, an “individual may feel empathy towards the other without the other being physically present” (Kumagai 2008). Therefore, it is possible to inspire a humanistic worldview through the use of narratives that can include art, literature, art, music, and other mediums of expression. By incorporating humanism into medical education, medical students can be better prepared to thrive in the relationships that await them ahead, and truly embody what it means to be a doctor and a

The doctor-patient relationship always has been and will remain an essential basis of care, in which high quality information is gathered and procedures are made as well as provided. This relationship is a critical foundation to medical ethics that all doctors should attempt to follow and live by. Patients must also have confidence in their physicians to trust the solutions and work around created to counter act certain illnesses and disease. Doctor-patient relationships can directly be observed in both the stories and poems of Dr. William Carlos Williams as well as in the clinical tales of Dr. Oliver Sacks. Both of these doctors have very similar and diverse relationships with multiple patients