# My First Day of Medical School

*An ambition ends at the gate; what begins is a register, a timetable and a promise*

Kanwar Partap Singh Gill, MD · November 7, 2026 · Becoming a Doctor

The word *ambition* began as a description of walking. In Latin, *ambitio* was a going around, from *ambire*, to go about, and in republican Rome it named the rounds a man made when he wanted office: the handshakes in the Forum, the canvass for votes, the calls on people who might help. He made those rounds in a toga whitened with chalk so that he could be picked out in a crowd, and the whitened toga, the *toga candida*, gave English the word *candidate*. An ambition, in the oldest sense, is the circling of someone who is not yet inside, dressed to be noticed by the people who decide.

That is not a bad description of the years before medical school. The applicant circles. He prepares for an examination that will rank him against thousands of others; he waits for lists; he goes about, in every sense, outside a door that other people control. Then one day the door opens and the circling stops. Taken at its root, the word makes exact a common way of describing admission: that once a student has walked through the gate, medicine is no longer an ambition. An ambition belongs outside. Admission ends it, not by fulfilling it, since nothing about becoming a physician has been fulfilled on the first day, but by changing what kind of thing it is. Outside the gate, medicine was something wanted. Inside, it is something owed: attendance, examinations, a timetable kept by other people, and in time a great deal more.

I will not try to reconstruct the day itself. First days are the most decorated memories anyone owns, and an essay that supplied the weather, the corridor and the first face would be offering ornament as evidence. What I can set down is what the public record says, which is in some ways stranger than a memory would be, and what a first day of medical school is for, which no record says at all.

The record first. Sri Guru Ram Das Institute of Medical Sciences and Research states in its own published profile that it was started in 1997 and that "the first batch passed out in December, 2002." Those are the years of my MBBS. The dates coincide: a student who began there in 1997 began in the college's first year, and his first day of medical school fell among the college's own first days. Most essays about arriving at an institution describe a newcomer entering something old. This one has to describe two beginnings at once.

## Entered in a Register

Before a student knows anything, an institution knows him, and it knows him as an entry. The old word for this in English universities was *matriculation*, from the late Latin *matricula*, a list or roll, a diminutive of *matrix*, the public register. To matriculate was to have one's name written into the roll of the members. The word has survived in India in a different sense, as the name of a school-leaving examination, but the older meaning describes the first day of any college exactly. A name moves from one list to another: from the list of candidates to the list of the enrolled. There is a roll number, a fee receipt, a form with a photograph pasted to it, a section, a batch. None of this is medicine. All of it comes first.

Punjabi has its own word for the event, and it repays a second look. Admission to a college is ਦਾਖ਼ਲਾ (*dākhlā*), from ਦਾਖ਼ਲ (*dākhal*), entered, a word that came into Punjabi through Persian from the Arabic root for going in. The same word is used, without any sense of strain, for a patient admitted to hospital: ਹਸਪਤਾਲ ਦਾਖ਼ਲ, admitted to the hospital, entered into it. English does the same thing with *admission*, and the coincidence across two languages is not a coincidence of meaning. In both cases a person passes from outside an institution to inside it, acquires a number, a bed or a bench, a set of people responsible for him, and a set of rules he did not write. The medical student's life will eventually join the two admissions together. He is entered into one institution so that, years later, he can take responsibility for people entered into another.

The first knowledge an institution asks of a newcomer is practical, and it would be snobbish to call it trivial. Where is the room. When does the lecture begin. Which notice board carries the timetable, and who changes it. Which books are required and which merely recommended, and who says so. What happens to a student who is absent. Such questions are the means by which a person learns that he has been placed inside a system with its own geography and its own clock. A student who cannot find the lecture theatre cannot learn what is said in it. For a student who had grown up in Amritsar, the city was not new, but the institution was, and an institution is a country with its own customs even when it stands in one's own city.

Amrita Pritam called her autobiography *Rasidi Ticket*, the revenue stamp, after a remark, so the story goes, that her life could be written on the back of one: the small adhesive stamp that once had to be fixed to receipts and affidavits before they counted. The title is an ironic acceptance of how little the official record holds. A first day of college is, in the official sense, a revenue-stamp event. What survives of it is a receipt, a number and a name on a roll. The larger thing that happened, the change from wanting to owing, has no place on the form. It is still the reason for the form.

## A College Also Beginning

The rest of the institute's early history is set out in [another essay on this site](../the-city-of-the-fourth-guru/index.html), and two of its dates matter here. Its main building, with the pre-clinical departments, the lecture theatres and the library, was completed in March 2000, when the first class was well into its course. And its MBBS degree was recognised by the Medical Council of India by a letter dated 31 December 2002, as that class reached the end. A new medical college in India does not begin with a recognised degree, so for five years a first class and its institution are, in a formal sense, on probation together.

There is something worth thinking about in that arrangement, and it is not only bureaucratic. A first class lacks one of the most important resources a new student usually has, which is a senior class. In an established college, the students a year or two ahead are a second faculty, unofficial and indispensable. They know which teacher expects what, which book is worth its price, what the first examination is really like, which rumours are false. Much of what sociologists of medical education call the hidden curriculum, the norms and habits that a school transmits without ever writing them down, travels from one class to the next by that route. A first class has no one ahead of it in the same building who has taken the same examinations there. It has to learn the institution from the institution, and the institution is still learning itself. In time the first class becomes the seniors for everyone who follows, and so passes on a culture it had to make up as it went.

How that felt to anyone in the class is not a matter of record. But the structural fact clarifies something about first days in general. An institution is not a finished thing that a newcomer joins. It is a continuing arrangement that each new class partly remakes. In an old college this is invisible, because the old customs absorb the newcomers before anyone notices. In a new one it is plain. The first day of a first class is a day on which a profession, an institution and a class of very young people all begin something whose shape none of them can yet see.

## What the Regulation Expected

Every first-year student in India in 1997 was governed by a document he was unlikely ever to read. The Medical Council of India had issued its Regulations on Graduate Medical Education in March of that year, and they were published in the Gazette of India in May, coming into force on publication. The regulations set the frame of the course: four and a half academic years divided into nine semesters of about six months each, followed by a year of compulsory rotating internship. The first phase, two semesters, was given to what the document calls the pre-clinical subjects, human anatomy, physiology with biophysics, and biochemistry, together with sixty hours of introduction to community medicine "including Humanities." No student could move on to the next phase until he had passed in all of them.

What is striking, reading the regulations now, is how ambitious they are, in the modern sense of the word. The first clause describes the purpose of the whole course as training students to undertake "the responsibilities of a physician of first contact." Later clauses ask that education be placed in historical perspective, "and not merely as an acquisition of a large number of disjointed facts", that the history of medicine in India and elsewhere form part of it, and that teaching be organised around small groups and problems rather than compartments. One sentence about method is blunter than most educational documents dare to be: lectures alone, it says, "are a poor means of transferring/acquiring information and even less effective at skill development." It is hard to think of a sentence that a first-year student, facing a timetable of lectures, would have been more surprised to learn had been written by his regulator.

A regulation is a statement of intent, not a description of any particular classroom, and I make no claim about how closely any college of that era matched its own rules. The point is narrower. The first day of medical school places a student under expectations written by people he will never meet, for a purpose described at a level of generality he cannot yet understand. *Physician of first contact* means nothing to a newcomer except a phrase. He is being prepared for responsibilities whose content he does not know, under rules he did not read, by an institution that is itself being inspected.

Twenty-two years later the regulator changed its mind about first days. An amendment to the same regulations, gazetted in November 2019 and applied to students admitted from that academic year, created a "Foundation Course" of one month after admission, and required universities to arrange their admissions so that teaching in the first year "commences with induction through the Foundation Course by the 1st of August." The objectives listed for that month are revealing. They include orientation to the medical profession, the MBBS programme, the history of medicine and medical ethics, and also something the document calls "the academic ambience." They include skills in language, interpersonal relationships, time management and stress management, and training in first aid and basic life support. Colleges may run a local-language programme or an English-language programme alongside, in the last two hours of the day.

Read as a historical document, the amendment is an admission. The regulator had concluded that arrival is a curriculum rather than a day: that new students need to be taught where they are, what the place expects, how to manage time and strain, and, for some of them, the language in which they will be taught. Everything on that list was presumably needed in 1997 as well. The difference is that by 2019 it had been written down.

## The Oldest Address to a New Student

The Indian tradition contains a far older account of what a teacher says to a student on the day of admission, and it is worth reading closely, both for what has lasted and for what has not. In the eighth chapter of the *Vimana Sthana* of the *Charaka Samhita*, the classical compendium of Ayurvedic medicine, the teacher who has accepted a student is told to initiate him in the presence of the sacred fire, of Brahmins and of physicians, and to address him. The address, in the English of the online edition of the text, is a list of duties. The student is to live in abstinence, keep his beard, speak only the truth, eat no meat, be free of envy, carry no weapons, and obey his teacher in everything except what would bring calamity. He is to live with his teacher as a son, a servant and a supplicant would.

Then the address turns from the student's discipline to his future patients, and the voice changes. He is to strive for the health of the sick with all his being, and not to harm a patient even for the sake of his own livelihood. He is to dress modestly, speak gently and in measured words, and keep learning. When he enters a patient's house, he is to go with someone known to the household whose entry is permitted, and once inside, to give his speech, mind and senses to nothing but the patient and the patient's welfare. What he learns of the household is not to be repeated outside. Even if he perceives that the patient's life is drawing to a close, he is not to say so where saying it would harm. And however learned he becomes, he is not to boast, because people are disturbed by boasting even from an authority.

The address ends with an instruction to the student about how to reply. In the same translation: "When the teacher has said like this, the disciple should say 'Yes'." The Sanskrit word is *tathā*, so be it. Only a student who accepts these instructions, the passage continues, is to be taught.

It would be dishonest to present this as a timeless ideal. Mixed into the same address are rules no modern institution would impose and no modern physician should obey: the physician is told not to treat people disliked by the king, nor those who are about to die, nor women in the absence of their husbands or guardians. The duties of attention, confidentiality, humility and fidelity to the poor patient stand beside rules of rank, deference and exclusion, in the same breath and with the same authority. The student is asked to say *yes* to all of it at once.

The order of the address is also instructive, set beside the regulation of 1997. The modern document opens with the patient: its first clause defines the whole course by the physician of first contact the student is to become, and it says nothing at all about obedience. The ancient address opens with the student's discipline and his submission to his teacher, and reaches the patient only afterwards. On paper the modern order is the more admirable. But the ancient order is the more accurate description of what a first day is actually like. A newcomer meets the institution long before he meets a patient: its teachers, its hours, its rules of dress and attendance, its expectation that he do as he is told. Charaka's teacher does not pretend otherwise. He tells the student plainly that he is entering a household with a head, and only then tells him what the household is for.

That is the deepest truth in the passage, and it is not limited to ancient India. Every institution's first rules mix the durable with the dated, and the newcomer, on the day he is asked to accept them, cannot tell which is which. He has no basis yet for telling. The first day of medical school is a day of consent given in advance of understanding: to a timetable, to a code, to teachers, to standards whose reasons will only appear later, if at all. Part of a medical education, and of any education worth the name, is the slow sorting of that first *yes*: discovering which of the things one agreed to deserve a lifetime's loyalty and which deserve, eventually, a respectful refusal. The confidentiality of the patient's house belongs in the first category. The king's enemies belong in the second. The student on his first day does not yet know that, and the teacher who speaks the address may not know it either.

## Unequal Familiarity

A class admitted by competitive examination looks, on paper, like a set of equals. Everyone passed the same test; everyone holds a rank above the line. On the first day, the paper equality meets the actual differences, and they are considerable.

The French sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and J.-C. Passeron described this situation in *Les Héritiers*, their study of French university students published in 1964, translated into English as *The Inheritors*. Their central observation was that students arrive at university with very unequal familiarity with its culture: its manner of speaking, its tacit expectations, its sense of what matters and what may be ignored. Students from educated families experience the university as an extension of home; others experience it as a foreign country whose customs must be learned. The institution, they argued, tends to read the first kind of ease as individual talent, a gift, and so converts an inherited advantage into what looks like merit. One does not have to accept every part of their analysis to recognise the phenomenon. Some students walk into an institution already speaking its dialect.

Indian medical colleges of the period had their own version of these differences, and they were not mysterious. Teaching was in English. Students who had been schooled in English carried an advantage that had nothing to do with aptitude for medicine, and students schooled chiefly in Punjabi or Hindi had to learn a new science and, to some degree, a new register of the language in which it was taught, at the same time. The 2019 regulation's provision for an English-language programme in the first month is a belated acknowledgment of that burden. Some students were the children of doctors and had heard the vocabulary of hospitals at the dinner table; some had never been inside a hospital except as visitors. Some came from villages to a city; some came only from one side of a city to the other. Each difference was a difference of familiarity, and each was easy to mistake, on the first day, for a difference of ability.

The mistake runs in both directions. Ease can pass for competence, and unease for its absence. A student who knows where to stand and what to say may know nothing more of the body than the student who stands awkwardly at the back. Confidence on the first day is largely borrowed, from family, from schooling, from temperament, and borrowed confidence is not the same thing as earned skill. The useful thing about the first year of medicine is that its central subject, the structure of the human body in the detail a physician needs, was new to almost everyone. Some students arrived knowing more biology than others, but nobody arrived knowing the course of every nerve. Within a few weeks, the inherited differences would begin to be overlaid by differences of work. They never disappear entirely, and an honest institution should keep noticing them. But they are not destiny, and the first day is the worst possible day on which to judge who will become a good physician.

## The Normal Body First

The regulations of 1997 put the first two semesters almost entirely into the normal body. Anatomy, physiology and biochemistry are the sciences of how a human being is built and how it works when nothing is wrong. Disease, in its own vocabulary, would wait for the second phase: pathology, microbiology, pharmacology, forensic medicine. The patient, as a person to be examined, would come later still.

It is worth noticing how long that deferral is, because the popular picture of medical school compresses it. A newly admitted student is often imagined, by himself as much as by others, as someone on the edge of clinical work, a person who will soon be listening to chests and making diagnoses. For most of the first year he does nothing of the kind. He learns names, structures and mechanisms. He learns, as the anatomy objectives in the regulations put it, to "identify and locate all the structures of the body and mark the topography of the living anatomy." The phrase *living anatomy* is a reminder that one of the first bodies a student studies carefully is his own and those of his classmates: the bony landmarks that can be felt through the skin, the pulses that can be found, the surface markings of organs that cannot be seen. The cadaver, the books and the first living patient each belong to essays of their own on this site. On the first day, none of them has yet arrived.

The order has a logic. A physician cannot recognise what is abnormal without a secure knowledge of the normal, and the normal body is vast. But the order also teaches something that is rarely said aloud. For the first part of his education, the medical student's object is a body in general, not a person in particular. He is trained in a kind of knowledge that is, for the moment, nobody's: anatomy that belongs to no patient, physiology that describes everyone and so no one. The first day is the beginning of a long apprenticeship in that impersonal knowledge, and much later, if the education works, it ends in the capacity to bring that knowledge to one person sitting in a chair, who is not a body in general at all. The first day is therefore the start of the longest delay in a physician's life: the years between being admitted to medicine and being permitted to practise it on anyone.

## Pride, Held in Trust

Is a first day of medical school a proud one? Accounts that recover, with perfect clarity, exactly the emotions the occasion seems to call for deserve some suspicion, and the question of pride on such a day is better considered on its own terms, because it is a moral question as well as a psychological one.

There is nothing wrong with pride in an admission. A seat in a medical college in India is earned by years of work, and the work is real. A student who has passed a hard examination is entitled to feel that something has been accomplished, and a culture that requires young people to pretend otherwise teaches them only to conceal their satisfaction, not to lose it. The difficulty lies elsewhere. Admission is the end of one competition and the beginning of an obligation, and pride that attaches itself to the first can forget the second.

Punjabi has a word that holds both sides. ਮਾਣ (*māṇ*) means pride, honour, self-respect; to be proud of someone is to have ਮਾਣ in them. But the same word names the reliance that others place in a person, the trust they extend on the assumption that he will not let them down, and to keep someone's ਮਾਣ, ਮਾਣ ਰੱਖਣਾ, is to honour that trust, to fulfil the expectation that was placed in you. Pride in this sense is not only something one feels. It is something one has been given, and that can be disappointed. A family's pride in an admitted student, a teacher's, a town's, is a trust lent in advance, and the student holds it the way one holds a deposit.

That understanding of pride makes room for the uncertainty that every honest newcomer must also feel, because a deposit can be lost. It also makes room for the people the first day leaves out. Every seat in a medical college is a seat that someone else did not get. On the day a class is admitted, many more people learn that their own ambition has ended in the other way, at the gate. Some of them would have made fine physicians. Pride that remembers them is less likely to become a sense of entitlement, and entitlement is the vice that a profession with great social standing has most reason to fear in its young. The first day is a good day to be proud and a better day to understand what the pride is for.

## What Could Not Be Known

The philosopher L. A. Paul, in her book *Transformative Experience* (2014), begins with a thought experiment that has become well known. A person is offered the chance to become a vampire, with the assurance that every vampire who has ever been turned reports that the life is wonderful. Can she rationally decide? Paul argues that the decision is harder than it looks, for two reasons. You cannot know what it is like to be a vampire until you become one, so you cannot weigh that experience against your present life. And becoming one would change your preferences, so the self who would judge the choice afterwards is not the self who must make it now. Some of the most important decisions in a human life, she argues, have this double structure: they are epistemically transformative, because they give access to experience that cannot be had in advance, and personally transformative, because they change who one is.

Choosing medicine is one of those decisions, and the first day is the moment when the choice becomes binding. The student who walks in has some idea of the profession, built from outside, from doctors he has watched and books he has read. He has no idea, because no one can have it in advance, of what it is like to hold responsibility for a frightened stranger, to be wrong in a way that matters, to carry a patient home in his head. Nor can he know what the work will do to his preferences: what he will come to find interesting, tolerable, intolerable; which parts of the profession he now admires he will later distrust, and which parts he now overlooks he will later love. He is making a promise on behalf of a person he has not met, who happens to be himself in twenty years.

Samuel Johnson put a related thought into the mouth of the poet Imlac in *Rasselas* (1759), a short philosophical romance about a prince who leaves the Happy Valley to make what the book keeps calling "the choice of life." The prince believes that his birth has given him at least one advantage, the freedom to choose for himself. Imlac is less sure. "Very few," he says, "live by choice. Every man is placed in his present condition by causes which acted without his foresight, and with which he did not always willingly co-operate." The prince is undeterred. "I have here the world before me," he says. "I will review it at leisure."

The medical student on his first day stands somewhere between the two. He has made a choice, and it was really his. It was also made inside a field of causes he did not choose: the subjects he happened to be good at, the occupations visible from where he grew up, the examinations that existed in his state in his decade, the seats available that year, the opinions of people whose approval mattered. Retrospect is tempted to make the choice look either freer or more fated than it was. The honest description is Imlac's: a real choice, made within causes that acted without foresight. The student did not have the world before him to review at leisure. He had a list, a rank and a deadline.

What follows from this is not regret, and not fatalism. It is humility about the first day's knowledge. The newcomer does not know what he has chosen, and the institution, however wise, cannot tell him, because the knowledge he lacks is the kind that only arrives through the experience itself. The medicine of 1997 also lacked a great deal that the medicine of today takes for granted, in drugs, in imaging, in the machinery of records and in the software now entering every clinic, and no student entering then could have pictured the profession he would practise decades later. The first day commits a person to a future whose content is unavailable. In that sense it is less like signing a contract than like taking a vow, and vows are made precisely because the future cannot be inspected.

## The Conclusion, in Which Nothing Is Concluded

*Rasselas* ends with a chapter whose title is one of Johnson's best jokes and one of his most serious statements: "The Conclusion, in Which Nothing Is Concluded." The travellers resolve to return home with their questions unanswered and their plans unfulfilled, and the book declines to pretend otherwise. I think of that title when I think about first days, because the honest account of a first day of medical school is a conclusion of exactly that kind. Something ends: the circling, the canvass, the ambition in its Roman sense. Nothing is concluded. The student who is admitted has not learned any medicine. He has not examined anyone or helped anyone. He has been entered in a register and has agreed, in effect, to a long list of things he does not yet understand.

That incompleteness is not a failure of the occasion. It is its nature. A first day is not a small version of a career; it is the point at which a person stops being judged from outside, by an examination that ranks him, and starts being formed from inside, by an institution that expects things of him. The candidate of the Forum walked around a building he wanted to enter, in clothing chosen to be seen. The student walks inside, and the clothing that will eventually mark him as a physician is not a costume for being noticed but a sign that others may rely on him. The change of position is complete on the first day. The change of person takes years, and is never quite complete.

The institute's record adds a second layer to the incompleteness. In 1997 the college was also beginning. Its main building would not be finished until March 2000, its degree would not be recognised until the last day of 2002, and the class that entered in 1997 would be the first to show whether the institution's promises could be kept. A first day at a first college is an arrival on both sides of the door: a student arriving in an institution, an institution arriving in a city, both on probation, both learning what they had undertaken.

If I try to say what the day was for, rather than what happened on it, the answer I keep returning to is the word in the *Charaka Samhita*: *tathā*, so be it. Before any knowledge, there was consent. The first day of medical school asks a young person to say yes to a profession whose demands he cannot yet see, under teachers whose standards he has not yet tested, inside an institution whose future is not yet known. Everything that follows, the anatomy and the examinations, the first cadaver and the first patient, the years of training and the decades of practice, is in part the slow discovery of what that yes contained, and the sorting of it, clause by clause, into what deserves to be kept.

Medicine was no longer an ambition. It had become something else, which did not yet have a name the student could use about himself. Later essays on this site take up the words for it: student, then doctor, then physician. On the first day there is only the register, the timetable and the yes, and the long work of earning the right to have said it.

## Evidence and Editorial Note

**Documented findings.** Public biography relied on: upbringing in Amritsar; MBBS at Sri Guru Ram Das Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, 1997–2002; family physician in California. The institute's start in 1997, first batch passing out in December 2002, completion of the four-storey institute building (offices, pre- and para-clinical departments, four lecture theatres, central library) in March 2000, clinical teaching at Sri Guru Ram Das Charitable Hospital, Vallah, and recognition of the MBBS degree by Medical Council of India letter dated 31 December 2002 and Ministry of Health and Family Welfare letter dated 23 January 2003: the institute's home page and "Profile" page (sgrdimsr.in). The essay notes that these dates coincide with the MBBS years in the public biography; it does not state which class the author entered. Medical Council of India, Regulations on Graduate Medical Education, 1997 (notification of 4 March 1997, published in the Gazette of India, 17 May 1997), as published by the National Medical Commission with later amendments marked: the "physician of first contact" clause, historical perspective and history of medicine, the sentence on lectures, four and a half years in nine semesters followed by a year of compulsory rotating internship, Phase I subjects and the sixty hours of community medicine including humanities, the requirement to pass Phase I before Phase II, and the anatomy skill "mark the topography of the living anatomy." Graduate Medical Education (Amendment) Regulations, 2019 (dated 4 November 2019; Gazette of 6 November 2019), applicable from the 2019–20 academic year: the one-month Foundation Course, induction by 1 August, and the listed objectives and language programmes. *Charaka Samhita*, Vimana Sthana 8.13–14 (the initiation address and the instruction that the disciple reply "yes"): English translation and text at Charak Samhita Online (carakasamhitaonline.com), "Rogabhishagjitiya Vimana." Samuel Johnson, *Rasselas* (1759), chapters XVI and XLIX: Project Gutenberg text. The statement that a new Indian medical college's degree is recognised as its first class completes the course, the etymologies of *ambition*, *candidate*, *matriculation* and ਦਾਖ਼ਲਾ, Amrita Pritam's *Rasidi Ticket* and the story usually told of its title, Bourdieu and Passeron's *Les Héritiers* (1964), the term hidden curriculum, and L. A. Paul's *Transformative Experience* (2014) and its vampire example: standard reference knowledge, paraphrased. **Vendor representations.** None.

**Recollection and tradition.** The essay reconstructs no scene from the author's first day or first year: no room, weather, person, ceremony, conversation or feeling is asserted. Where the institute's records are silent (for example, where teaching took place before March 2000), the essay says so rather than supplying an answer. The Ayurvedic initiation is described from a classical text, not as a practice at any modern college. Remarks about the familiarity and backgrounds of students in Punjab in the late 1990s are general observations about the period, not descriptions of the author's classmates. No hypothetical scene is used.

**Analysis and forecast.** The reading of ambition as circling outside a door, the comparison of student and hospital admission, the interpretation of the first class's position without seniors, the reading of the 2019 Foundation Course as an institutional admission, the sorting of Charaka's address into durable and dated rules, the account of ਮਾਣ as pride held in trust, and the application of Paul's and Johnson's arguments to the choice of medicine are the author's interpretation as of November 2026. **Independence.** This essay is not sponsored by any institution, company, health system or technology developer.



## Related reading

- [The Anatomy Books I Carried Everywhere](https://personal.kpsgill.com/essays/the-anatomy-books-i-carried-everywhere/)
- [The First Cadaver](https://personal.kpsgill.com/essays/the-first-cadaver/)
- [Learning to Use a Stethoscope](https://personal.kpsgill.com/essays/learning-to-use-a-stethoscope/)