The Whiter Coat

14 December 2014

The Whiter Coat

            I hadn’t worn it in a year.  Halfway through internal medicine residency, I’ve lost two of my allotted four. But yesterday, for the Millions March in NYC, I donned my white coat under the banner of “White Coats for Black Lives,” over jeans, under scarf and knit hat. Doctors worldwide wear stethoscopes—a necessary tool, used for heart-lungs-belly-neck. A patient feels taken care of if you’ve listened to her heart and lungs. We have the laying on of hands and the laying on of stethoscope diaphragm and bell. Doctors worldwide wear white coats, a tool of nothing but repository for tools, a signifier of identification, power, an instrument of implementing hierarchy, and whatever else (including the positive) that is associated with the profession. With power comes implied responsibility, a mandate to earn the given trust.

            Before even my first day of medical school, we received our white coats in a ceremony, parents came and took pictures, and we solemnly recited the Hippocratic oath, months before touching our first patients. A symbol of induction into the lifelong guild. For students, the white coat is short, still symbolizing power to patients perhaps oblivious to the length, but clearly showing the lowest rank to other doctors. It takes so many years to arrive at medical school. We had made it. Quickly, I learned to hate the coat, resent it, except for its many practical pockets, and I relished the rotations—pediatrics and psychiatry—that didn’t require and even discouraged its use. In my social medicine program, there is something vaguely uncool about the white coat, the long white coat we worked so hard to achieve. I wore it for the protest, yesterday, faint ink marks still visible after hospital dry cleaning, in a contingent of many others---to show we know We are an institution, We are implicit and complicit, and We, in positions of power, are here in solidarity because, among other things, racism is bad for health.

            But to reject the whiteness of the coat requires whiteness, no need for cloth that soon shows sweat stains to confer that final privilege.

Let there be equatorial light

le 27 mars 2013

I used to think of writing (or doing anything inside) by headlamp as spelunking. It was certainly more practical than my first year PCV strategy of candles and kerosene lamp propped on various books and papers—before I had a table—and sitting hunched over to the in the right part of the penumbra.

It’s a funny thing about light.

The Constant Gardener came out weeks before I left for Peace Corps in Cameroon. Without mention anything else I love about the movie (which was great for terrifying many parents of about-to-be PCVs about to move to Africa), the light struck me. The quality of it. I’d noticed years before that Paris has its own quality of light. Some photos, movies capture it (Amélie does). I don’t think you can successfully pretend that something is filmed in Paris.

This light, though, the Kenya-in-the-movie light, was unlike anything I’d ever seen.

And then I moved to Cameroon.

It’s the same light. Gazing across the city at very familiar views this morning (Yaoundé, like Rome or San Francisco, is a city of hills), I remembered it. I have photos of the same view, and in the US they look—faded. Light-stained. But that’s how things actually look.

The forest almost never comes out, either. I think it’s more greens than the human eye can discern (we can see sixteen shades of gray, I recently learned, on CT scans).