“My Reason the Phisition to my Love”: On Being Pre-med at Wabash College
Undoubtedly a significant majority of those who are reading this article considered themselves “pre-med” when they were rung in to Wabash College their freshmen year. And probably many of you still do, but it is more likely that an even greater majority have chosen another career. It seems that, when we are faced with the tough question of what we will be in life, being a doctor is a knee-jerk answer. That so many people aspire to be a doctor (although so many fail) certainly speaks to the good nature of the profession. Doctors are usually respected and successful members of community and are seen as upstanding figures. This perception in some ways accounts for the disgust people have for immoral doctors. It is no light matter when a doctor is discovered to have taken advantage of his patients.
But why are doctors put on such a pedestal? Well, doctors from the time they cut our umbilical cord until they notice the absence of our pulse have an intimate place in our lives. Everyone knows this. The profession is unique by nature in that people divulge their most private and difficult issues to their physicians. Doctors are present at the most important moments of our lives. They birth us, save us when we are deathly ill, birth our children, minister to our parents and grandparents as they near death, and when they do die. The relationship that a doctor has to his patients is different than any other business relationship, and to even consider the relationship economical is in many ways an insult.
Our relationship with doctors transcends the physical realm, because being sick or healthy is not only a physical matter. What happens to our bodies certainly affects us emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually. Therefore, our perceptions of doctors involve these other spheres of our lives. Anyone who has had a “good” doctor (and you know what I mean by good: someone who comes to the room with more than a list of questions, who looks you in the eye and listens, who cares about you) knows that doctors are more than machines that have been programmed with medical knowledge.
Therefore I was worried at a pre-med meeting I attended last fall, when Dr. Dallinger asked those present why they wanted to be a doctor. As you might guess, the answer that outstripped all the others was, “I want to help people.” Do not get me wrong, this is certainly a good thing, and was better than the couple of guys who jokingly said, “For the money.” But what does it mean to say that you want to help someone. Does it mean make them not feel pain? Because then any drug dealer would then be a well-qualified pre-med student.
I write this essay to everyone who is thinking about becoming a doctor. I write it in hopes that you will think about why you want to be a doctor and what it means to be a doctor. As you might have noticed, I am not a doctor, but I do want to be one (as I have told relatives what seems to be millions of times when they ask what I am going to do with my life). These questions, which are so central to my future life, are very tough to work out, but I am thankful that it is at Wabash College that I get to wrestle with them.
What does Wabash College have to do with being pre-med? Well apart from the fact that our placement rate for medical school is so great (and I am sorry but that is not a suitable reason to go to Wabash as opposed to IU or Ivy Tech), we are a liberal arts college. What does the liberal arts have to do with being a doctor you ask? Everything. Otherwise what makes a pre-med student at Wabash different from those at other universities, and our novelty is not found in our distribution courses either.
Why Wabash? Why as future doctors do we put ourselves through the liberal arts? I do not need to know a foreign language, or be able to read philosophy, or understand the political situations that lead to the war in Iraq to cure diseases. So why do we all devote hours upon hours to these seemingly worthless subjects? We subject ourselves to the rigors of liberal arts to learn about humans. Not in the focused areas of biology, chemistry, history or psychology, but about human nature. We are here to struggle with the questions of what it means to be a human, and study our curious selves through the multiple lenses of the liberal arts.
If you do not think knowing about what it means to be human (or at least trying to know) is important to being a doctor, then please reassess your career goals. If we do not understand what it means to be a human, how can we understand what it means when a human dies or how can we consider bringing another human into existence? And believe me, as a doctor, you must face these questions. I spent last summer shadowing doctors in the emergency room, and one of the main things I learned was that I know nothing about the world. Life is more real than we can ever perceive from our sanctuary here at Wabash College. What do you say to a family when their seventeen-year-old son just had a heart attack? How do you respond to girls that are thirteen and pregnant? How can we grasp a women’s obstinacy towards receiving a pacemaker that will save her life and insistence on accepting death?
Our society is powerful. We have the technological ability to wreak havoc on our world and us. Doctors have a responsibility to be stewards of their patients’ health. Apart from that being a blatant truism, we need to consider the depths of the statement. We must assess the ways that medicine effect humans on more levels than just physically. This is consistent with the role that doctors play in the patients’ lives. Our bodies are not separate from our souls. We have the capability to affect patients emotionally and in many other ways, and therefore we must consider our actions and the power of the medicine at our fingertips.
In short, a doctor must be a gentleman. We all know that Wabash makes boys into gentleman. We knew from the moment we read the first piece of mail sent to us in high school by recruiters. Becoming a gentleman is an intrinsic part of attending Wabash. One might even go so far as to say that becoming a gentleman is the goal of a Wabash College education. The arcane ways of this College have been shaping men since Caleb Mills was busting students for gambling.
Again to understand the potency of this college, we must return to the liberal arts. Being pre-med is a great experience that is fostered by the wonderful science programs and professors. One of the great strengths of science at Wabash, however, is that it is part of a larger that we as students have with our education. Yes a pre-med student we spend significant amounts of time in lab, but we also devote hours to the other parts of the liberal arts. Even more we begin to understand the sciences as part of the liberal arts rather than as their own entity.
As students pursuing careers in medicine, we should do our best to realize the place of science, especially medical science, within the greater context of humanity. Therefore, devote yourself to your others classes as much as you do to science. We have much to learn from this college outside Hays. In every class that you take here, think about the human condition, and what your relationship to humanity will be as a doctor. So again, “why do you want to be a doctor?”
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