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Why Do Doctors Write?

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The first patient I ever wrote about wasn’t actually my patient; as a first-year medical student, that possessive grammatical construct—“my patient”—hadn’t yet entered my consciousness, much less my lexicon. In any case, by the time I met him, he was already dead. I’d followed my fellow-students into the bowels of the medical examiner’s office, just north of Bellevue Hospital, past the silent storage areas of unclaimed bodies and into the clamor of the autopsy room. There he was—a boy, maybe twelve years old, claiming hardly any space on the metal table.

The New Yorker     Jun 07, 2025