Review on Anamnesis -
"This is a tour de force of an anthology crafted by the wonderfully thoughtful student-Dr. Ganz of Italy. While there is no "wrong" time to revisit the role of humanity in medicine, he argues there is none better than now. The more technology we have developed to enrich ourselves, the sicker and the more hopeless we seem to feel. As a millennial with fond memories of being the first generation to grow up "with the Internet," here in the United States, I was aghast at how much of my pediatrics rotation was stricken with eating disorders and suicide attempts in a world dominated by Instagram models and Twitch streamers: cyberbullies abound, everyone is FaceTuned, and everyone is doing better than you.
I like to joke that med school taught me three skills: how to read fast, how to walk fast, and how to shut someone up fast. Even the kindest health workers are constantly torn between empathy (I want to listen to my patients talk about their hopes and dreams), and efficiency (I risk the needs of my more pressing cases, let alone take a hit on my grades as I rush in late for rounds). And this is the sad reality. Dr. Canz, poignantly, writes of his training: "seeing healthy people become sick almost continuously, I found that we are not taught much, perhaps nothing, about the pain, the suffering, the desperate search for hope of those lying before our scrupulous eyes." Some element of pressure and competition is necessary to build a competent physician, but we lose sight of even ourselves in the rat race of this versus that specialty, this versus that residency program. And off we go to practice, a la House of God by Samuel Shem.
Ironically, I used e-commerce to purchase Dr. Ganz's book and Al translation to recreate it from Italian to English, but this is also when I come to appreciate the universality of medicine, which is to say really the human experience. The moving essays shared by students and experts draw upon the wisdom and heartbreak of timeless writers, philosophers, even funnyman Stephen Colbert, contextualizing their own personal experiences across Europe, the US, and even Kenya. And coming from a Zen Buddhist family, I can particularly resonate with major themes; that we all are reliant on one another in ways we may not appreciate, that perhaps modern society has concealed what brings real satisfaction to our lives before sickness and death come chasing for all of our tails. So often we forget.
Dr. Ganz possesses both a gift for language and an extraordinary emotional intelligence, even for someone in the medical (and dare I clarify, surgical!) field.
His work is something to behold in this chaotic day and age, and I applaud him for challenging us to rediscover how we make humanity great again."
