A short lighthearted video to brighten your day 🙂
Author: dailydoseofhumanities
Vocation
Submission by: Kwabena Adubofour, MD
IT COMES FROM the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a man is called to by God.
There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Super-ego, or Self-Interest.
By and large a good rule for finding out is this. The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you’ve presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you’ve missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you’re bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren’t helping your patients much either.
Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do.
The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
Originally published in Wishful Thinking
BY FREDERICK BUECHNER
Ten Commandments of Physician Wellness
Submisison by: Kwabena Adubofour, MD
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4453302/
From Edward J. Krall, MD: “There is a lot of press about the stress of practicing medicine, but less about the secrets of thriving. There is literature about resilience. It has limitations, but several themes have emerged. Pulling together ideas from that literature and experience from my work with colleagues, I offer to residents these “Ten Commandments of Physician Wellness.”
1. Thou shall not expect someone else to reduce your stress.
2. Thou shall not resist change.
3. Thou shall not take thyself in vain.
4. Remember what is holy to thee.
5. Honor thy limits.
6. Thou shall not work alone.
7. Thou shall not kill or take it out on others.
8. Thou shall not work harder. Thou shall work smarter.
9. Seek to find joy and mastery in thy work.
10. Thou shall continue to learn.
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Submission by: David Go, OMSIII
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own… not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.”
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
I chose this quote for daily dose of humanities to remind us that there will be some difficult patients that we will encounter as physicians, but we must remain composed. We cannot let our frustrations compromise our level of care and compassion. Instead, try to understand why is it that the patient is frustrated. Sometimes listening and being present with the patient provides healing on its own. Patient health especially those with chronic disease is only achieved when patient’s trust their doctor and work together as a team to achieve the goal.
Osler’s Corner
Submission by: Kwabena Adubofour, MD
“The young doctor should look about early for an avocation, a pastime, that will take him away from patients, pills, and potions…”
William Osler BMJ 1909;2:925-928.
“Like song that sweetens toil, laughter brightens the road of life, and to be born with the sense of comic is a precious heritage”.
William Osler ‘Two Frenchman on Laughter‘, CMAJ 1912(II):152
“Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day’s work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition”.
William Osler. Aequanimitas ‘After 25 years.’ 1914:213
“There is a form of laughter that springs from the heart, heard every day in the merry voice of childhood, the expression of a laughter — loving spirit that defies analysis by the philosopher, which has nothing rigid or mechanical in it, and totally without social significance. Bubbling spontaneously from the heart of child or man. Without egotism and full of feeling, laughter is the music of life”.
William Osler. Two Frenchmen on laughter. Men and Books. CMAJ 1912;(II):152
“Things cannot always go your way. Learn to accept in silence the minor aggravations, cultivate the gift of taciturnity and consume your own smoke with an extra draught of hard work, so that those about you may not be annoyed with the dust and soot of your complaint”.
William Osler. Aequanimitas ‘The Master-word in medicine.’ 1914:385
“To serve the art of medicine as it should be served, one must love his fellow man”.
William Osler. Modern medicine, its theory and practice. 1907;(1):34
“Keep a looking glass in your own heart, and the more carefully you scan your own frailties, the more tender you are for those of your fellow creatures”.
Homan E quoting Sir William Osler:Teacher and bibliophile. JAMA 1969;210:2223-5
Book Murdering
Submission by: Emily T.
I recently saw a post on twitter about a hotly debated issue where twitter user @alex_christofi asked: “Yesterday my colleague called me a ‘book murderer’ because I cut long books in half to make them more portable. Does anyone else do this? Is it just me?”. https://twitter.com/alex_christofi/status/1219564301029138432
I was first shocked that someone would ruin a book like this, but then I thought that this was actually quite practical. With larger books it can be cumbersome to carry around and splitting it in half would help with portability.
Not long after seeing this twitter post, I found that Constance Grady at Vox wrote an article tackling the exact conundrum pointed out by the above Twitter post. She discusses how and why we’ve come to romanticize the value of a book and whether or not we should. She concludes her article with the following thoughts:
With a codex, you can get interactive with the text. You can dog-ear the pages if you choose. You can scribble in the margins and underline and highlight. You can rip a codex in half so it’s easier to carry around and dip into during your commute. Or you can treat your books as decorative objects. You can organize them by color. You can build collages with their spines. You can rip out the pages and use them to paper your walls. If you want to make people really mad, you can rip a book into pieces and then organize the shreds by color. None of these choices are moral failings — and all of them mean that you’re taking full advantage of the enormous flexibility and power of the printed book. And maybe that’s a power worth romanticizing.
https://www.vox.com/culture/2020/1/21/21075327/book-murder-ripping-books-in-half-color-coding-shelves-spine-in-marie-kondo
To all the readers out there, what do you think about ripping a book in half like this? Would you ever do it?
Daily Dose of Humanities 