Valerie Gribben: Practicing Medicine Can Be Grimm Work
Selected Excerpts
“… when I started medical school, I packed up my youthful literary indiscretions. I reordered my bookshelf, moving my well-thumbed but now irrelevant Brothers Grimm stories behind a biochemistry textbook. Within weeks my desk was crammed with printouts on fractures of the humerus and the intermediates of oxidative phosphorylation. I was thinking in terms of proximal and distal, instead of hither and thither.”
“The practice of medicine bestows the sacred privilege to ask about the unmentionable. But what happens when the door to Bluebeard’s horror chamber opens, and the bloody secrets spill onto your aseptic field of study? How do you process the pain of your patients?”
“Fairy tales are, at their core, heightened portrayals of human nature, revealing, as the glare of injury and illness does, the underbelly of mankind. Both fairy tales and medical charts chronicle the bizarre, the unfair, the tragic. And the terrifying things that go bump in the night are what doctors treat at 3 a.m. in emergency rooms.”
Discussion Questions
How did you react to the essay by Dr. Gribben? Did it resonate with your experience?
Dr. Gribben left her fairy tales behind when she went to medical school. What parts of yourself have you left behind when entering the hospital or clinic? As a patient? As a family member? As a clinician?
The gritty details in this essay are what make it so haunting, so powerful. Which specific descriptions captivated you?
Dr. Gribben returns to stories as a way of coping and making sense out of suffering and tragedy. Have stories helped you make sense of your experiences with illness and healthcare? How so?
Reflections from #MedHumChat
“One of the most powerful resonances for me was the author's attempt to make sense and meaning out of the cavalcade of horrors encountered in clinical year without much preparation or time to reflect.” —@DanielEison
“The imagery of abuse flooded back memories of child abuse cases I saw in medical school/residency that still are fresh wounds in my memory. Time I just wanted to scream, punch a wall, run into a room and cry. I didn't know how to process those events back then.” —@AdamHill1212
“Patients have their stories to tell, our interactions are only a page in their story, sometimes it's the last page. Not all of them have happy endings either. The stories are how we find meaning in what can sometimes feel senseless” —@thisisnotharsh
“I loved that a student held tight to something artsy that they were passionate about in their pre-medical life & found a way to relate it to their life in medicine” —@DianaCejasMD
“I have found that the things I had initially believed irrelevant (art, poetry, painting) are truly the things I need to flourish. “ —@RanaAwdish
About this #MedHumChat
“Practicing Medicine Can Be Grimm Work” was paired with “Intensive Care,” a poem by Jane O Wayne for a #MedHumChat discussion January 2nd, 2019 exploring the question: Can fairy tales and poetry help us heal?
The pieces for this chat, along with the discussion questions, were selected by Colleen Farrell.
About the Author
Dr. Valerie Gribben, MD is an author and pediatric hospitalist at the University of California, San Francisco.