“So much depends”: The Sestina and Learning Medicine

What makes the sestina such an entrancing poetic form is not just its 6-lined stanzas’ compulsively repeated endings, but also the variation of the repetitions’ order, which evokes the very human impulse to keep returning to the same task in an effort to get it right. Perhaps this aspirational perfection makes the form so applicable to clinical care, especially the work of medical trainees. The pressured “see one, do one, teach one” ethos of medical school is expressed in “So much depends,” the...