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The Blues Taught Me to Really Listen to My Patients
Medically reviewed by Margaret Cary, MD, MBA, MPH
Updated on June 6, 2020
A dying blues man helped a med student learn to really listen. He learned that his patients are so much more than they first appear.
Hard time is here
And ev’rywhere you go
Hard times is harder
Than th’ever been befo’
The opening lines of a century-old Delta blues song ring out among the stars and the dark of a rural Virginia night. I sit tenuously awake atop an old wooden stump in front of a farmhouse, where four minds sleep peacefully inside. It is 3:00 AM.
From the window, I hear the sound of the needle dragging across the old, worn-out record until it bleeds muffled sound into the crisp mountain air. Grass fields illuminated by the light of the moon ripple in the wind like waves on the surface of the water. In this place, the wailings of man and guitar propagated across generations have never seemed so poignant.
I have plumbed the depths of the blues
In my mind and with my hands and heart I have plumbed the depths of the blues. I am…
