I spent the summer between the first and second years of medical school in the emergency department at Cincinnati’s major trauma hospital. More specifically, I spent summer nights there, studying the effects of interpersonal violence. Cincinnati is both a friendly city and a violent city. People say “Hello” when you pass in a corridor. At first, coming from Boston, this mid-West style of friendliness took me aback. At the same time, the Brady Campaign gives Ohio and Kentucky (which is just across the river from Cincinnati) a D and an F for gun laws. Both ranked into negative numbers on a scale of 1 to 100. Guns are cheap, plentiful, and easy to obtain. As you’d expect — gun violence is rampant. Firearm injuries happen with such frequency that there was a dorm on campus for military medical personnel who train in trauma medicine at the hospital. Think of it — the military finds American urban medical centers enough of a war zone that it is a staging area for their doctors and medics before deployment to the battlefield. In fact, gun violence deaths in U.S. cities each year vastly outnumber American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Like most medical students entering their second year, I had completed gross anatomy. I had interviewed patients in the hospital, and I had shadowed physicians in their offices. In my life prior to medical school, I had assisted veterinary surgeries but had never seen inside a living human body.
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