Sublime

These were the patients who saw that illness was not a failure and that pain was not a punishment.

locate and revitalize neglected parts of himself, ranging from his poetic gifts to his thirst for an intimate social network.

But if I didn’t work in the clinic I feared another kind of erasure: the denial of the doctor I had been for most of my adult life. Where did this feeling come from? Medical school. Part of the curriculum, no less essential than anatomy and physiology, is the teaching that physicians do not turn away from human suffering. Others may avoid the sickl

The NEJM editorial confused blame and responsibility. While all of us dread being blamed, we all would wish to be more responsible—that is, to have the ability to respond with awareness to the circumstances of our lives rather than just reacting. We want to be the authoritative person in our own lives: in charge, able to make the authentic decision

From the earliest days of my medical career I’d held a deep, intuitive feeling, almost a sympathetic pain for patients whose illnesses made them unrecognizable, sometimes even to themselves. Perhaps because I’d experienced my own identity as fragile, my old fear of not having a handwriting, I saw myself in these patients.

It’s only now that I can see the dissonance that was the most painful: to Brian and me and our close circle, he was still the much-wanted individual person he’d been since arrival. But to nearly everyone else, he became the diagnosis—forever described and understood and interpreted primarily by genetic status.

David Barlow. He was (and still is) one of the premiere anxiety researchers on the planet.

despondency.