Healthcare Professionals Blog

By Dr. Jonathan Weinkle

A pair of healers, one an experienced teacher of medicine, the other a freshly-minted intern, reflects on the transforming power of the third year of medical school in the recent piece, “Into the Water – The Clinical Clerkships.”  

The intern, Neal Chatterjee, describes the jarring, unnatural moments that punctuated his third year, and concludes that the experience is, “like being thrown head first into water,” only to eventually become such an adept swimmer that one is unaware of the water at all.  His teacher, Katherine Treadway, turns this acculturation on its head.  During that “power and turmoil,” the “high level of compassion with which students enter medical school” begins its well-documented sharp decline.  “It is ironic,” says Treadway, “that precisely when students can finally begin doing the work they . . . came to  . . .  do . . . they begin to lose empathy.”