2014 Wakley Prize Essay winner: a good year for the Roses

Abstract

Earlier this year we invited readers to submit entries for the 2014 Wakley Prize Essay. We were rewarded by a rich selection of submissions that ranged from memorable encounters with patients to personal experiences of illness. The winning essay, “On seeing Roses”, by Johanna Riesel, a Paul Farmer Global Surgery Research Fellow in the Program in Global Surgery and Social Change at Harvard Medical School and a General Surgery Resident at Massachusetts General Hospital, is published in this issue. Riesel refl ects on how the experience of helping a neighbour in cardiac arrest, and the subsequent friendship she formed with him and his wife, Rose, revitalised her interest in patient care. Riesel had, she writes, reached a moment in her career when “I was burnt out, wondering why I had ever committed myself to such a gruelling, unrewarding, and debilitating life”. All doctors, on honest refl ection, will admit to having had such thoughts at least once in their lives. Her developing relationship with Rose, however, reminds her that patients are “individuals whose existence is often intricately woven into the lives of others”. The experience leads Riesel to think about the idea of accompaniment in medicine. This idea—that physician and patient forge a partnership, a mutual community, as they journey together through good times and bad—is potentially transformative. But Riesel thinks it is rarely espoused in practice. She asks “would this change if all patients were treated as if they were our neighbours? As if they were those close to us both in location and commonality? As if they were one of ‘us’, a part of our communities?” This winning essay refl ects on a way to achieve the best of both worlds: science and humanity working together for better health for patients and doctors alike.