Here’s the thing. Here’s the thing here’s the thing here’s the thing. Learning all this medical history. History of medicine. How we got here and shit. All the little secrets and fun little eureka moments that got experienced by doctors over the years. Even this visual of med students sitting around with polio patients manually ventilating them around the clock. It makes me feel like I’ve been slighted somehow. Well, not slighted. I don’t take it personally. I know it’s just a sign of the times. I think it’s more like… false advertising.

These doctors are teaching us from the perspective of a bygone era. The technology, the capitalism, the everything is just too different from when they were learning this shit. I don’t relate to them at all. They’re teaching us how to be doctors in the most far-removed possible way. They don’t give a fuck, it seems, about showing us REAL CLINICAL SHIT. I don’t think they do. At least I haven’t seen that in my training yet. I suppose [redacted] comes close. At least other students seem to have experiences where she helps them do more of the “real shit.” But that’s one, literally one, person. And she’s a [redacted] in other ways, so it doesn’t count.

The other thing is, like, how sanitized it is…. Like, it’s getting stripped of all the meaning and storytelling that could actually make this shit interesting in the first place.

Actinomyces coming from the black soil and this scientist getting obsessed with soil and discovering it or some shit.

Penicillin being, like, an accidental discovery.

Polio causing kids’ respiratory muscles to get paralyzed, so they can’t breathe, so their spit accumulates around their lips and in their mouths, and they turn into old people because they become so aware of their mortality.

Faggot cells.

Like, none of this has ever been taught to me, but it’s stated quite matter-of-factly in this book I’m reading. Why are these kinds of things being kept from us? Why can’t we learn about the cool stuff? Is that stuff even happening anymore, or is it all just boring drivel these days?

We don’t say faggot cells anymore, we say… well, I don’t even know if there’s a word for that anymore. Auer rods, but it’s more than that… it’s the cell that HAS the rods… and it opens up this whole new fucking memory palace of possibilities for learning it and thereby understanding it. No, instead, they’re trying to train us to just somehow be like “APML is about, uhhhhhh…” See, like when I don’t have the faggot worldbuilding I can’t come up with anything to say about it.

These are just my current reflections on being a medical student, three years into the degree, three and a half years in I guess, and reading a book called “the rise and fall of modern medicine.” I’m feeling much for the first time my place in this trajectory, this lineage of doctors, and it feels kind of cool but mostly just extremely anachronistic. Like… we are not the same. What I’m doing is not the same as what they were doing back in the day. The hay day, I guess is what they called it. Shit is very different now, I’m afraid.