The clinical year transforms every medical student into a particular kind of physician. How it changes you depends on how you learn to work with other people. Pathologists see death’s premonitions in tissue samples. Trauma surgeons tragically feel death take over a body under their hands. Primary care practitioners attend to a person who slowly sickens and dies. Medical students decide what relationship they desire with death, an uncommon decision for people their age. They need to know the body, but they can also know more.

A first-year medical student takes time to find out who her trauma patients really are, or were.