Why memories should be noted

Bullying. The dominance, the arrogance, the vanity of it all. Think of the medical students who must keep their heads low. They are always on the line. They have to make the right impressions—or at least avoid making the wrong ones.

What baffles me is that most if not all consultants must have been irked, piqued, offended, disgusted, even exasperated while they were bullied as medical students. So why is it that some still end up bullies? What fuels this vicious circle?

Do memories of these wrongs merely dissolve into a fast receding past? Memories, of course, decay. Does the mind simply reconstruct the past in an overly positive light, and people forget that they ever suffered these same wrongs? Nostalgia is always in the business of wiping away the bad and indelibly printing the good in our memory. Or does the slow passage of time simply dull our sensibilities, even reverse all we had held to be true?

The distracting slings and arrows of middle age may contribute to the loss of youthful idealism. It’s so easy to consider these changes in the perspective of thinning hair, the gradual mellowing down and placidity that is often confused with wisdom.

Does relativism take over? What is right or wrong anyway? Isn’t that all we’ve been fed in medical school? That is the tradition of medical practice. Or is it the savage case of the oppressed becoming the oppressor as he or she takes out what he or she has suffered on someone else?

I noticed a surprising trend while editing my class’s final yearbook. A greater proportion of my classmates, usually the most brilliant, who considered themselves likely to end up in academic medicine, gave the names of the most tyrannical consultants as their most admired teachers.

The playwright Wole Soyinka suggested that despots find it easy to remain in power because of “the self willed ignorance of brilliant men who bend their skills and intelligence to ensuring the continuity of power by rationalising and even applauding the crudest barbarities of power.”

Although it might sound far fetched, this seems the most plausible explanation. This perverse identification with power figures may in reality be self identification. The viewpoint that validates and justifies the activities of power may in turn affirm the existence of the student.

Medical practice will continue to be steeped in a quasiterrorist quagmire that thrives on fear of failure and loss of professional recognition until we all choose to combat this bullying hierarchy individually. The way out lies in developing a critical awareness of what goes on around us every day, learning to constantly interrogate our own motives and feelings. To keep our memories intact, my simple suggestion is that we keep written records of events as we pass through medical school. This is the only way these things can remain pure in our memories so that we never repeat them. And if you’ve not yet suspected, that is exactly what I am trying to achieve by writing this article—I’m taking notes.

   

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