The New Yorker:

For physicians, curiosity and care spill easily onto the page.

By Danielle Ofri

The first patient I ever wrote about wasn’t actually my patient; as a first-year medical student, that possessive grammatical construct—“my patient”—hadn’t yet entered my consciousness, much less my lexicon. In any case, by the time I met him, he was already dead. I’d followed my fellow-students into the bowels of the medical examiner’s office, just north of Bellevue Hospital, past the silent storage areas of unclaimed bodies and into the clamor of the autopsy room. There he was—a boy, maybe twelve years old, claiming hardly any space on the metal table.

His jersey was pushed up to reveal a smooth preadolescent chest. His pristine basketball sneakers were oddly bright in a room that has since receded into shadow in my memory. I hardly registered the narrowness of the gap between our ages because I was blindsided by how small the bullet hole was. I didn’t have the language to articulate how something so tiny could carve such devastation.

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