Medical Ethics in Utah
Current month's Newsletter
January's medical humanities recommendation, for your enjoyment, is "Mistakes," by David Hilfiker:
David Hilfiker's "Mistakes," a chapter from his memoir Healing the Wounds and included in the second and third editions of On Doctoring, is arguably one of the best-known physician confessions of the past twenty-five years. Originally published as a "Sounding Board" article in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1984, it is a description of Hilfiker's unintentional abortion of a living fetus. The article evoked a number of letters to the editor, many of them praising Hilfiker's courage ("Who among us cannot describe similar personal 'horror stories'?") and many of them criticizing such a public disclosure of fallibility ("This sort of neurotic piece has no place in the NEJM."). Hilfiker writes of his growing guilt and his growing isolation because the "grand illusion" of perfection expected of doctors and the fact that physicians hide mistakes from patients, from other physicians, and from themselves hindered him from sharing his own suffering: "Unable to admit our mistakes, we physicians are cut off from healing. We cannot ask for forgiveness, and we get none. We are thwarted, stunted; we do not grow."
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