Vocation. The term originates in voco, vocare: to call – one of those first conjugation verbs mastered early on by students studying Latin. The English term, vocation, preserving the consonant t, derives explicitly from the passive past tense form, vocatus: to have been called.
As I read through drafts of medical school statements, I return frequently to the aptness of this original form, vocatus, to describe an aspiring physician. The strongest essays retain the passive sense of the original verb form; the young writer really has a singular and predetermined path. This course may sit at the intersection of varied interests – music, science, math and art – still the nexus untangles in one direction: medicine.
My premedical students who are musicians are among the most exemplary of vocation. When the pandemic precluded bedside performance, one young woman took to virtual visits and streamed live concertos over Ipads set up on hospital dining trays. Another played the harp in palliative units throughout college. A classics major, she considered herself a modern Orpheus, whose lyre strains once caused even the shades in Hades to cease their suppliant mourning. In the music, momentarily, there was relief. (It was not mere fancy that led the Greeks to ascribe the purviews of both music and medicine to the god of youth, Apollo. ) Music clarified the limits of my student’s premedical knowledge. She wanted not merely to attenuate pain but to remove it, whence the drive toward medicine. Her background in music will simply ensure she has the tools and empathy for those occasions when the medical options have all played out.
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