by Rachel Naramore, MD

During residency, it’s easy for your love for medicine to consume your other loves. YouTube videos about ventilator management replace action movies. Journal articles replace novels. Time spent in the hospital with patients replaces time spent with other friends and family. Resident wellness is not so much about balancing your work with the rest of your life as it is about reminding you that there is such a thing as the rest of your life. That’s why every month or two, a group of us meet outside of the hospital to talk about something we all love: reading.  

Six of us go consistently, though any fellow readers are welcome. We usually meet at a restaurant with plenty of comfy chairs for us to settle in and talk. The books we choose are diverse. Last time we read The Sun Does Shine, a memoir of a Birmingham area man who was falsely accused of murder and spent thirty years on death row before being exonerated. The time before it was News of the World, a novel about a man escorting a young German girl who had integrated into a Native American family back to her blood relatives. The book can be about anything at all, as long as it’s not medicine.

The book club is important because it reminds us that there is more to life than medicine and more to medicine than the pathology of disease. Medicine is the study of the human body; literature is a study of humanity. The humanity of medicine is what drove most of us to clinical practice, and yet it’s easy to lose the person in the pathology. Through literature and through this opportunity to spend time with friends, we are reminded of the relationships that give our lives fulfillment, both in and out of the hospital.