Why I am keeping this notebook

Medicine is taught faster than it is absorbed. In a single week of the fourth year I will meet a mechanism in a lecture, see it half-obscured on a ward round, and then read the primary paper that established it — usually in that order, which is exactly backwards. Writing is how I put the three back into sequence.

So this is a notebook, published openly. It is where I work out what I have understood.

What will appear here

Three kinds of entry, roughly:

• Case notes. Anonymised, consent-respecting write-ups of presentations I have seen or read about, focused on the reasoning rather than the outcome.
• Reading summaries. A paper or a chapter, condensed to the argument and the evidence behind it, with the parts I could not follow marked as such.
• Essays. Longer pieces on medical education, ethics, and the practical business of learning clinical medicine in a second language and a third country.

What will not

No patient-identifying detail, ever. No advice — this is a student's working record, and it should be read as one. Where I am uncertain I will say so plainly, and where I later find I was wrong I will correct the entry rather than quietly delete it.

A note on method

I try to hold each entry to one claim. If I cannot state the claim in a sentence before writing, I do not understand the material well enough to write about it yet, and the honest move is to go back and read again.

That constraint is the whole method. Everything else here is just consequence.