a very medical few days

When I first started medical school, my parents were very proud of me, my school was proud of me, and I was scared that I would not live up to their expectations.  Studying for the first two years, learning the theory, separated into different themes, didn't seem very doctor-like, and yet there was always a sense that it would go towards something, that I was working for some as yet unknown thing.  I have often thought about the way that we are taught medicine.  For example, medical schools can teach the traditional way, they can integrate teaching with PBL and communication and ethics and so forth, or they can base it around PBL, with extras added on.  I never really thought about the way that we have come to learn about medicine before.


Taking History of Medicine as a specialist course has opened up my ideas about the way that medicine was perceived in the past, and how its role in society has changed and how it's more accepted, and now patients have the power to challenge their doctors, compared to the patriarchal system as it used to be.  Our class had the chance to visit the Hunterian Museum, in the Royal College of Surgeons, a building which, I feel, doesn't compare to some other buildings I have seen in London, and also surpasses my feelings of other buildings.  The museum looks very modern, and contains many specimens, both of animals and humans.  There are instruments and many displays, many of which I didn't get to look at.  Combined with a reason to eludicate the anatomy of the human body, I think physicians were curious about the body, and its inner workings.  I do think that Nature doesn't do anything for no reason, I don't feel as if there are many things that are now redundant.  I suppose evolution finetunes things.


In particular, I found the preservation of the Evelyn Tables to be very interesting, almost mapping the human body in veins, arteries and nerves.  It felt very... touching almost to see these laid out.  It felt different to seeing cadaveric specimens.  The reproductive part interested me greatly too; there were embryos and fetuses of various gestational ages, which made me feel sad in a way.  A lot of specimens I have seen in the past, cadaveric or plastinated have forced an emotional detachment, but seeing fetuses preserved in glass bottles, although serves the purpose of educating the student, brings home the point that sometimes dissection comes at a price.  There was also a skull of a hydrocephalic person, which was grossly dilated.  I've studied the in utero abnormalities during my time at medical school, and this translated for me just how much I underestimated the scale of what it can be like.


At the weekend, I went to the Maternal and Women's Health Conference, hosted in SAF and organised by the ICSM TropMed Society.  It was interesting in that it covered topics that are not normally touched upon during the undergraduate course, and provoked emotions in me that in a way brought out a protective instinct.  The Millennium Development Goals, to me, are a set of ideals that the world is working towards, and although we ARE working towards it, it seems to be slow progress.  And one of the speakers told us that in order for all of these to be obtained for women, they must have female empowerment.  Basically, men are preventing women's ability to decide their own fertility.


And lastly, I had an hour long conversation with my mummy, trying to explain to her about microvascular decompression, vivas and variation in operation risk.


Fun times :)