Haunted Doctors

The idea of being "haunted" appears often in accounts of the experience of health-care professionals and trainees who suffer from unresolved sorrow or regret about past clinical events, in particular the deaths of patients. The trope of haunting draws a direct line between past professional trauma and the dread of future failure, a connection embodied as a spectral patient who revisits the physician with doubt, anxiety, and exhaustion. This article suggests that the sense of being haunted may be a useful index for the unresolved effects of two omnipresent and underappreciated components of clinical practice: emotion and uncertainty. By connecting the aspects of feeling and (not) knowing that lead to physician suffering-in trauma that is inextricably both emotional and epistemological-a sustaining sense of meaning might be generated. Doctors' work is, in several senses, weird, and medicine might benefit from paying closer attention to the etiologies and manifestations of its ghosts.