For many students, who - like me - have had no prior clinical experience, third year is the first real
contact with medicine, the first taste of what doctors really do, what doctors are really like. I saw
medicine as a humanistic career of intimacy - helping people, sharing, caring for people. But what I
found was a profession that didn't even seem to care about people. No one around me seemed to question
what was happening to them, to the patients, to all of us. As Michelle Harrison wrote in her book A
Woman in Residence, "I came to feel I had been fighting a war which no one else even knew existed."[4]