My own biases certainly colored my experience of medical school. I remained deeply conflicted about my choice of career and longed to have more time to write poetry. It was easy to blame medical school itself for my unhappiness. In fact, I used the inflexibility and rigor of medical school to contain what I thought of as my wild, unacceptable impulses. Perhaps, I imagined, Harvard could make me straight, an upstanding citizen, more American, less likely to have AIDS. Perhaps, by doing research fifteen stories up in a monolithic concrete building dissecting rats’ eyes under a microscope, I could improve my immunity, I could make myself blind to my connections to those dying people. If only I could take out my own eyes. If only I could trade in my poet’s voice box for that newfangled, antiretroviral vocabulary, for a clean-cut physician’s anatomically perfect larynx.