Voices That Remain: A dialogue about mentors, memory and what matters

Some voices outlast the people who spoke them. In his Crossroads blog, “The Voice that Lingers,” (June 19, 2026 Intima) Kenneth Iserson, a professor emeritus of emergency medicine, tells it as a physician: the dead mentor keeps speaking in a student's stethoscope, in a resident's patience at two in the morning, even in the margin of a machine's report that has learned to wait before it concludes. The voice refuses to be deleted — not because anyone saved it, but because it had gone in too deep, beneath the skin, beneath the name, where not even death goes looking.

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On “The Difficult Patient” and the efforts to mediate ER doctors’ hearts by nocturnist Thomas Robey

Neurologist Kendra Peterson explored reactions to “The Difficult Patient” in her poem (Fall 2017 Intima) nearly a decade ago. Long before chart cloning and copy forward worked their way into the documentation of the clinical relationship between patient and physician via the keystrokes and dot phrases of the electronic medical record, caregivers have developed shortcuts of stereotyping and rapid assessment that make their lives easier.  Clinical gestalt is often celebrated, while bias is treated as something separate from it.  And is the label “difficult” any different than the convenience of using yesterday’s assessment as the foundation for today’s decisions?  Is propagation of a name or a label such as ‘difficult patient’ a type of plagiarism? 

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