Medicine, Fiction, and Time
Dec. 31st, 2009 10:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ladyspriteWhenever I mention being a veterinarian, the conversation eventually and inevitably comes around to James Herriot. It's not surprising - the man has come to represent the Platonic ideal of Veterinarian in the minds of most people. But it always leads me to think down a bunch of interesting paths, most of which end up at the destination of 'that's not what I do.'
When I was growing up, my parents were fairly adamant that they did not want me to be a veterinarian. I, on the other hand, was fairly adamant that that was exactly what I was going to do, and they could cram their conflicting goals somewhere dark and gooey. This became a conflict fairly early on in my life, since I declared my life path somewhere around my third or fourth birthday, when I took my Fisher-Price doctor kit and, instead of tending to my dolls or my mother, promptly chased the cat out from under the sofa and proceeded to violate her in every way imaginable to a toddler, all in the name of medicine and science. (If you're in heaven, Misty, and can see or hear this, bless you for not shredding me alive. You were, and are, a saint of a creature.)
This led to several new rules. No pets other than said cat (who predated me in the household); no 4-H club, no horseback riding lessons, and no James Herriot novels - no exposure to anything that might encourage me in my path. None of this stopped me from bringing home wounded birds, frogs, and worms, lurking outside stables and feeding horses my lunch, or sneaking the books while I was at the library, but they tried.
Eventually the rules were rescinded, in the hopes that reading about lying on my stomach in cow poop in the middle of a winter night might discourage me where merely banning things hadn't, but by then the books were already a guilty pleasure. And for all that some of the stuff he had to do sounded kind of disgusting, more than that it was fascinating. I loved the imagery and the ideas, the theater and spectacle of medicine, the hands-on nature of everything he did, the way he worked with people as much as animals. I read them and loved them and read them again, all at a fairly early age.
And then I moved on, and read other books. And went to college, and went to vet school, and learned more about medicine, and the Herriot books faded to warm fuzzy memories of 'someone who does stuff like me.' Until I realized that my husband hadn't read the books, and in the process of hunting them down for him I decided to reread them myself, for the first time in decades.
I hadn't realized until then just how drastically medicine had changed in 50 years, give or take. It's one thing to realize, intellectually, that antibiotics didn't exist that long ago, and another entirely to read blithe and unapologetic stories about practicing medicine in that time. The same is true with anesthetics, surgical protocols, medical recordkeeping.... it's an entirely different world, and it changed so quickly. And when I read about his life, and his work, and what he did - it's so alien to what I do today, that saying 'You're a vet? Cool, I love James Herriot!' is almost on par with saying 'You do Quality Control? Cool, I love Upton Sinclair!'
At the same time, I can't deny that he was an amazing writer. And if his stories aren't relevant to modern medicine and practice, that's not a crime. They're stories, and they're good, and they're fun. And for all that I look at the medicine and feel both amused and horrified, I also have to acknowledge that, while the medicine may have changed, the people haven't. There's not a whole lot of difference between 'pig gone bezique' and 'I fixed my dog's ear surgery failure with tampons,' and that's something it does me good to remember.
It's also good, though, to realize how much and how quickly things have changed. It makes me wonder what vet students 50 years from now will think about how I practice medicine, and what sorts of challenges they'll face and what problems that I wrestle with now will have vanished....
When I was growing up, my parents were fairly adamant that they did not want me to be a veterinarian. I, on the other hand, was fairly adamant that that was exactly what I was going to do, and they could cram their conflicting goals somewhere dark and gooey. This became a conflict fairly early on in my life, since I declared my life path somewhere around my third or fourth birthday, when I took my Fisher-Price doctor kit and, instead of tending to my dolls or my mother, promptly chased the cat out from under the sofa and proceeded to violate her in every way imaginable to a toddler, all in the name of medicine and science. (If you're in heaven, Misty, and can see or hear this, bless you for not shredding me alive. You were, and are, a saint of a creature.)
This led to several new rules. No pets other than said cat (who predated me in the household); no 4-H club, no horseback riding lessons, and no James Herriot novels - no exposure to anything that might encourage me in my path. None of this stopped me from bringing home wounded birds, frogs, and worms, lurking outside stables and feeding horses my lunch, or sneaking the books while I was at the library, but they tried.
Eventually the rules were rescinded, in the hopes that reading about lying on my stomach in cow poop in the middle of a winter night might discourage me where merely banning things hadn't, but by then the books were already a guilty pleasure. And for all that some of the stuff he had to do sounded kind of disgusting, more than that it was fascinating. I loved the imagery and the ideas, the theater and spectacle of medicine, the hands-on nature of everything he did, the way he worked with people as much as animals. I read them and loved them and read them again, all at a fairly early age.
And then I moved on, and read other books. And went to college, and went to vet school, and learned more about medicine, and the Herriot books faded to warm fuzzy memories of 'someone who does stuff like me.' Until I realized that my husband hadn't read the books, and in the process of hunting them down for him I decided to reread them myself, for the first time in decades.
I hadn't realized until then just how drastically medicine had changed in 50 years, give or take. It's one thing to realize, intellectually, that antibiotics didn't exist that long ago, and another entirely to read blithe and unapologetic stories about practicing medicine in that time. The same is true with anesthetics, surgical protocols, medical recordkeeping.... it's an entirely different world, and it changed so quickly. And when I read about his life, and his work, and what he did - it's so alien to what I do today, that saying 'You're a vet? Cool, I love James Herriot!' is almost on par with saying 'You do Quality Control? Cool, I love Upton Sinclair!'
At the same time, I can't deny that he was an amazing writer. And if his stories aren't relevant to modern medicine and practice, that's not a crime. They're stories, and they're good, and they're fun. And for all that I look at the medicine and feel both amused and horrified, I also have to acknowledge that, while the medicine may have changed, the people haven't. There's not a whole lot of difference between 'pig gone bezique' and 'I fixed my dog's ear surgery failure with tampons,' and that's something it does me good to remember.
It's also good, though, to realize how much and how quickly things have changed. It makes me wonder what vet students 50 years from now will think about how I practice medicine, and what sorts of challenges they'll face and what problems that I wrestle with now will have vanished....
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 04:03 pm (UTC)Wait... what? Can you tell this story?
no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 04:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 04:15 pm (UTC)I can see three fixes:
1. Make it unprotected.
2. Befriend me so I can view it
3. Leave it as is, in which case I'll not read the story.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 04:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 08:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 04:12 pm (UTC)But I can see a lot of Herriot in what you've written about your practice. Obviously not the techniques or medicines, but the love for your patients, the joy in seeing an animal healed by your hand, the heartbreak in when things don't go right, the laughter at what the animals (and owners) do, the frustrations at what the animals and owners do, etc. As you said, the people and animals haven't. And in both you and Herriot, you are dedicated to your work and making the best of what veterinary medicine has to offer as tools to make them better.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 07:17 pm (UTC)Thank you. :)
no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 04:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 04:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 05:33 pm (UTC)So you've never been a person AT ALL to them; even as a baby you were only an investment. You do realize how much this explains about the way they treat you now, yes? You're still an investment, but an under-performing one, and they can't sell you and buy something better.
A child is not a mutual fund, dammit!
no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 07:12 pm (UTC)Yep. I think my dad actually used those exact same words at one point, when we were talking about applying to med school. Something about the money he spent housing and feeding and clothing me, and how I sure as heck owed him at least that dollar amount back.
It's not that much of a revelation to me; I've always known that.....
no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 10:32 pm (UTC)And I presume he's paid back every dime his parents ever spent on him? (Of course not, that's DIFFERENT. I can hear it from here.) Ptui. What a waste of perfectly good oxygen.
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Date: 2009-12-31 08:22 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2009-12-31 05:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 06:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 08:39 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2010-01-01 12:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-03 04:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-04 10:32 pm (UTC)If you haven't read the biography of Herriot that his son wrote, I highly recommend it. I also recommend visiting the Herriot museum if you are ever in England, it is awesome (for a veterinarian, anyway, but even Sebastian_tombs enjoyed parts of it).