Musings and Meditations

The first year of medical school was easily one of the most difficult academic years of my life...thus far.   And I don’t mean “difficult” in the usual sense. The courses weren’t necessarily too hard. The professors weren’t overly demanding. The exams weren’t excessively complex. The first year of medical school, however, did force me to introspection. To consider what I like to call the “Olivia Pope Questions” of my life. What was my end game? What were my life goals? Ultimately, what did I want? I found myself attempting to juggle—unsuccessfully at times—a full workload, the responsibilities of leadership in several organizations, the sometimes-subtle pains of existing as a minority student at a PWI, the strain and stress of maintaining my interpersonal relationships, and my duties as an aunt, sister, daughter, and friend. Over the course of the year, I realized that in executing The Kia Byrd One Woman Juggling Act , it is impossible to balance everything. My own personal satis...

The context of the nineteenth century in the United States of America spurred a number of social and political movements and ideologies by African-Americans that responded to the brutal oppression of slavery and sub-citizenship endured during that period. Among northern communities of free Blacks, covert gatherings of southern slaves, meetings of federal government officials, and societies of abolitionists, individuals voiced their thoughts and opinions on potential solutions that could, in their respective interests, address and alleviate the condition of the Negro in America. A number of prospective solutions included the idea of Black emigration and the creation of settlements outside of the United States. In response to the efforts by the American Colonization Society in 1816—efforts to create settlements in Liberia and Sierra Leone for free Blacks—a number of Africans in America gravitated to three major camps regarding the idea of emigration: (1) rejection of colonization in fav...

One of my former professors in college once revealed to me that all fields and all disciplines trace roots to the field of philosophy—a field concerning the understanding of knowledge, existence, and reality. A physician-in-training, I am now committed to a life’s work of understanding how the field of medicine examines how people experience reality on a daily basis. While reading Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains , a work focusing on the life and work of Harvard physician and global health advocate Paul Farmer, I was impressed by Farmer’s unwavering dedication to his patients [see previous blog post, Paul Farmer: Lessons from the Mountains (Part1) ]. As I continue reading Mountains, I am further fascinated by his philosophies and theories concerning the role of medicine in promoting, what Farmer refers to as, "Liberation Theology.” Kidder describes liberation theology as theology with an “emphasis on the horrors of poverty and on redressing them in the here and now, ...