When I first read Joseph Zarconi's poem American Sonnet for an Addict, I thought it was asking many of the same questions that concerned me while writing my essay Re: Interesting Case. Both seemed interested in the uneasy space between a person's experience and the clinical language used to describe it. But I kept returning to the way the poem begins: "The doctor drags his learning flock into my room."
Read moreWhat Do Doctors Get From Name-Calling? A reflection about our reaction to ‘difficult patients’ by nephrologist and educator Joseph Zarconi
Palo Alto neurologist Kendra Peterson's poem “Difficult Patient” (Fall 2017 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine), and the patient who inspired my “American Sonnet for an Addict” (Fall-Winter 2025-26 Intima) are prototypical victims of name-calling – a ubiquitous clinical behavior taught exclusively in the so-called hidden curriculum of medical education. These patients are our albatrosses, another name we ascribe, recalling the curse that befell the entire ship’s crew of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous mariner following his killing of an albatross in the poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” They curse us. They burden and encumber us.
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