Anna Harvey Bluemel is a medical doctor and junior clinical academic in the north of England.
One of the earliest clarifying moments of my medical career was in my first week of medical school in the dissection room. As we carefully opened the abdomen of the cadaver we had been gifted—“your first patient”—I remember thinking how strange it was that bodies look as different on the inside as they do on the outside. Having only seen detailed drawings of our insides before then, the true mystery of the body cracked itself open in my head that day, as tens of nervous first-year students similarly cracked open the metal shells in which the bodies lay. We rotated around the tables, encouraged to appreciate the nuances of anatomy, each body with the same overarching make-up but also so different, just like those pictured in Raina Greifer’s “Bodies” (Intima, Spring 2018).
That day was eight years ago, and I’m now at a new beginning: a freshly minted doctor. In my poem “Cure-alls” (Intima, Spring 2022), I reflect on a case I was involved in during my first months as a doctor in which the eventual outcome was unexpected. I had done everything as I was taught—taken a history, examined, investigated appropriately—and still, the body I had tried to observe had not behaved in the way I expected. Where did my anger lie: with myself, my lack of ability to predict the unpredictable? Or with that body, for being different to the pictures and case histories I had learned from, for not doing what I had hoped it might?
Medicine, as a discipline, can be seen as an attempt to exert control over bodies—to peel back the layers of a human, find the bit where the cog isn’t catching, fit the teeth back together and smooth the layers back into place. In learning the minutiae of anatomy, physiology, and pharmacology, we hope that—arrogant as we are—we can put people back together again. Our bodies are not only far more complex than what we learn in medical school, but there is also so much still unknown about them, these tiny little universes in which we live.
Despite our knowledge, we are still, in many ways, stumbling through the dark: searching for that chink of enlightenment, that scrap of poem or song or scientific theory that will make everything make sense, and allow us to believe that we have control over what may come to pass. When writing my poem, I chose archaic terms for medical conditions to reflect that whilst we may flatter ourselves to know more than those witch doctors of the Middle Ages, there is still so much more for us to learn.
As medical professionals, one increasing part of our job is to be vessels of uncertainty, to share in the cracks and flakes, to accept that we cannot always plaster them over. The differences in bodies, and how they behave, continues to awe and humble me.
Anna Harvey Bluemel is a medical doctor and junior clinical academic in the north of England.