A medical experience that taught me about humanism in medicine: burn in.

When something really terrible happened, it wasn’t heralded that way. The terrible cases were almost never the really ugly cases, the ones with a lot of blood and gore. The terrible cases usually did not have disfiguring, bloody things happen to them; they tended to be more sedate, because the worst ones for us were not the ones that came in through the door of the trauma bay. Traumas were usually drunk, or unconscious, or both, and if they were really seriously injured, they were usually quickly paralyzed by drugs and intubated, reduced to a manageable set of physiological processes. For a terrible case, one that caused a whisper, the patient had to be someone we couldn’t make ourselves forget was a real person.