Student Spotlight: Mary White

During my medical career, my writing was con­fined to aca­d­e­m­ic jour­nals, book chap­ters
and grant appli­ca­tions. I never imag­ined writing for any other reason. However, within weeks of
my early retire­ment, I began record­ing the details of pivotal events from my medical
expe­ri­ences. I did not under­stand at the time that I was storing the infor­ma­tion for when I was
pre­pared to analyze those events, my per­son­al response to them and my deci­sion to leave
aca­d­e­m­ic med­i­cine. Now I’m ready to respond to the urge to explore them through writing.

Is there an author who has most pro­found­ly influ­enced your work?

Char­lotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is the book that has most pro­found­ly influ­enced my writing.
Brontë described pivotal child­hood expe­ri­ences which deeply affect­ed her pro­tag­o­nist and
formed her character’s moral frame­work. Jane’s deci­sion to refuse mar­riage to Mr. Rochester
because he was still married to the mad­woman locked up in his house, pro­vid­ed a lit­er­ary
example of how to act with moral courage against injus­tice. I plan to examine my own moral
devel­op­ment and how it has influ­enced my career and life decisions.

Why did you choose Stonecoast? 

I am lucky to have rec­og­nized and respond­ed to certain epipha­nies during my life, which have led to greatly reward­ing out­comes. One of those “Aha” moments arrived when I read the online descrip­tion of Stonecoast’s WISE (Writing for Inclu­siv­i­ty and Social Equity) program, which “offers pas­sion­ate stu­dents an inten­sive MFA in cre­ative writing that is deeply con­nect­ed to the most urgent issues of our time”. This res­onat­ed with me, as I explore ethical sit­u­a­tions that I have faced and how they jived with or clashed against insti­tu­tion­al pri­or­i­ties in the deliv­ery of patient care. I am grat­i­fied that Stonecoast stu­dents and faculty have fully engaged and sup­port­ed me as I ques­tion medical systems, physi­cian atti­tudes and how they affect their patients.

What do you hope to accom­plish in the future? 

I hope to create a col­lec­tion of per­son­al essays and memoir that explores and explains my
deci­sion to leave my tra­di­tion­al medical career. It still trou­bles me that I acted on that deci­sion,
despite my fas­ci­na­tion with human disease, my appre­ci­a­tion for the art of med­i­cine and, above
all, my affec­tion for my patients.

I recent­ly received my Maine medical license. Once the over­whelm­ing demands of the
COVID pan­dem­ic on the public health system ease, I hope to work within the Maine medical
edu­ca­tion­al system to estab­lish a human rights program that trains and engages vol­un­teer
physi­cians in the eval­u­a­tion of per­se­cut­ed immi­grants seeking asylum in this country.

If you could have written one book, story, or poem that already exists, which would you choose?

I have three. Jane Eyre is one, per my com­ments earlier. In the non-fiction genre, I would
select Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Sons; Wilkerson’s ability to convey the
moti­va­tion for and the impact of an entire move­ment of people and culture through per­son­al
nar­ra­tives inspires me to tell the story of just a few doctors and patients that will high­light
sys­temic issues in the insti­tu­tion of med­i­cine. I also love Seamus Heaney’s poem, Digging,
because it depicts the writer’s desire to wield his pen instead of a shovel, the expect­ed tool in his
agrar­i­an family; I desire to wield my pen instead of a stethoscope.

A Study

by Mary White

I’ve noticed that when you read a book, you place your left fore­fin­ger against your
cheek and then place your left middle finger below your lower lip, as if to support it. Your pose
is dif­fer­ent when reading a doc­u­ment: then, you press your lips with the tips of the three
middle fingers of your left hand, as if react­ing to bad news.

In con­ver­sa­tions, you fre­quent­ly adjust your glasses by raising the left bar with your left
hand, even if the action does not correct anything.

When you are at the toilet, direct­ing the flow with your right hand, the fin­ger­tips of your
left hand lightly caress your left shoul­der (if you are shirt­less) or the nape of your neck (if you
are dressed).

Often you will track down an errant curl just behind your ear; you capture it between
your fingers then coil it around one finger. This repeats: capture and coil.

You wipe your mouth after every bite of food, as if afraid to leave the slight­est vestige
behind. This creates an anxious atmos­phere to dining; bite and wipe, bite and wipe.

You unbut­ton the cuffs of your Brooks Broth­ers shirt, stick your left arm—half bent—in
the air, while you roll up the shirt­sleeve to a con­strict­ing 2 or 3 inches above the elbow. You
follow this by rolling up the other sleeve. Later, you unnec­es­sar­i­ly secure the tight rolls again.
You put into place what was already in place.

From this garden of man­ner­isms that I grow to know well, a weed emerges.
At dinner, I ask, “What are you doing?” You look up, expres­sion­less. “You’re pushing
your hand down the front of your pants.”

“I’m not doing any­thing,” you scowl and go back to eating.

I assume that you aren’t aware of how this behav­ior looks to others. I bring it up again.

“It looks like you’re check­ing if you’re still intact,” I observe.

“What,” you say flatly, with feigned innocence.

“What you’re doing, tucking your shirt deeply into your pants. It looks like you might be
taming an erec­tion.” We stare at each other. Then, you shrug.

One day, when we meet in your office, sur­round­ed by other men and women at the
table, I notice you do it there too. You hold the left side of the waist­line of your pants and then
probe deeply, with your right hand. It is too far down, inap­pro­pri­ate­ly deep. Alarmed, I force a
noisy closing of my note­book and loudly clear my throat. I scan the faces in the room; did
anyone notice?

Maybe people don’t notice a single “adjust­ment”. But I witness it in private and in
public; it is uncom­fort­able and embarrassing.

I realize now what it rep­re­sent­ed. In poker, they call it a tell—an uncon­scious action that
betrays an attempt­ed deception.

Mary is a retired physi­cian, who left the prac­tice of med­i­cine at the age of 41. Since
2005, she has vol­un­teered as a medical eval­u­a­tor of people seeking asylum for per­se­cu­tion or torture in their home country. And since 2003, she has vol­un­teered in Haiti, both before and
imme­di­ate­ly after, the 2010 earth­quake. Cur­rent­ly, she is a board member of a school for dis­abled chil­dren in Haiti.

Her writing con­sists of memoir and per­son­al essays, both explor­ing the per­son­al and
insti­tu­tion­al factors which led to her early depar­ture from med­i­cine, which had been her passion and life’s calling.

She recent­ly moved from New York City to the island of North Haven, Maine with her
two Havanese dogs. She has two grown daugh­ters who live in Montana and Iowa.