She shows us, chapter by chapter, what it means to practice emergency medicine as both a Black doctor encountering racism and a person who has witnessed and survived terrible abuse. Michele Harper’s memoir challenges this one-dimensional portrait of physicians by excavating her own personal history, holding it up to the light, and pushing her readers to do the same. Though we tend to the vulnerable night and day, we physicians must find ways to suppress our own humanity and vulnerability while on the job. Yet I am keenly aware that my own humanity, in all of its beauty and brokenness, is not allowed in the rooms where I minister to patients and teach my colleagues how to balance a respect for personhood with invasive, painful ways of treating illness with medications and machines. As a writer and a palliative medicine physician myself, I help patients retain their humanity by helping them to articulate what matters most to them in the face of illness and death. We are chastised for being robotic or standoffish, yet our professionalism might be questioned if we cry in front of a colleague or patient. We are both expected to play God and admonished for thinking we are God. Doctors inhabit a strange place in American society.
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