What is Wrong with Grace in Graduate Medical Education?

Graceful Contemplator and Sun-Bather

How do you define grace in a doctor in training?

This and other questions usually contemplated in philosophical seminars rather than in medical school lecture halls are being debated today at the milestones retreat organized by our WU office of Graduate Medical Education.

As my colleagues from other specialties laugh at the seemingly ludicrous notion I am reminded of my medical school days where rotations in medical specialties felt akin to hanging out with exotic alien species a la Star Trek. Not alien to each other, but alien to me the  phenotypically distinct one destined to become a psychiatrist.

I can easily define grace in one of my fellows: it is the appearance of effortlessness as a practitioner, which typically only comes with a very high level of clincal mastery and confidence, akin to the grace of a dancer who seems to float above ground in gestures which in no way evoke the grueling work it has taken to get to this level of beautiful levitation. Grace is doing something hard, like puzzling together the myriad behaviors of doctoring and making it look easy.

The italians have a word for this: Sprezzatura.  By nature, this is rare in a young physician but I can tell when it is developing.

Since milestones are defined differently by medical specialty, it looks like "being able to define grace and other seemingly nuanced phenotypes" could be a good candidate for a psychiatric milestone...

Till Later,

Anne