This is a blog in which I am planning to collect and curate various writings of mine from 1996 onwards, which in some way relate to medicine or medical practice. “Some way relate” could be very broad. This arises from my inchoate desire to anthologise my writing, and the suggestion (from Simon Cutts and Erica van Horn) that blogging some of my past pieces may be a way to try and find a common thread.
I am a doctor. I have never let this define, or wanted to let this define me. In ways, my writing has always felt like something separate from medicine. I even practice under a different name. A relatively small percentage of what I have written is directly about medicine.
However, medicine is a thread through much of what I have written, even invisible, and all I have written as an adult has been as a medical student or a practising doctor. Some influence, to say the least, is inevitable both ways.
Furthermore, I am interested academically and personally in medical education, and particularly trying to capture the “hidden curriculum”, the processes of becoming that are not captured in any matrix of learning outcomes or assessment schedules. Systems have a life and existence entirely uncaptured by the organogram or the flow sheet.
My initial working hypothesis is to try and gather pieces that will in some way trace my own development within medicine, even tangentially. I intend to publish pieces from the past – some from a few months ago, some from nearly twenty years ago, some from peer reviewed journals, some from student magazines and various freesheets, some written to express a deeply felt perspective, some written for the money (not that many, really) – and see what happens.
Seamus Sweeney
(Jan 15th 2016 – I have some further thoughts about this blog, although I don’t intend to adjust this text)
A Medical Education 