No Apparent Distress: A Doctor's Coming of Age on the Front Lines of American Medicine

by Rachel Pearson

THAT WORK IN THE CLINIC was the beginning of my life becoming unspeakable. So many of my stories are hard to tell. One does not go to a party and tell stories that end in “But the baby died three days later, with sepsis,” or “And then we removed the old man’s leg.” One does not go to a party and speak of blood slipping down the drain at an abortion clinic. No story I could tell seemed like it would do justice to the women I had met, anyway, and so I began to keep a kind of silence that has become part of my professional life.

This is the precise strangeness of learning to see like a doctor. If you believe hard enough in the truths of biochemistry and anatomy, what surrounds them—people with their suffering, the politics of a society that lay this particular body into your hands—seems not to matter at all.

IF EVERY YEAR OF MY LIFE were like the first year of medical school, my tombstone would read, “She studied.”