Doppelgänger

When a parent is also a physician, family stories often become stories about medicine, as exemplified by those told to Tenley Albright, Class of 1961, for the article “Families” in the Autumn 2013 issue of Harvard Medicine magazine. As a daughter of Tenley and a granddaughter of Hollis Albright ’31, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, too, grew up listening to stories about doctoring and the education and life of physicians. Two generations of stories about learning medicine through the study of cadavers in anatomy class have been distilled by Gardiner into the poem “Doppelgänger.” In this podcast, Gardiner reads her poem.

Gardiner founded and directs the Thursdays Writing Collective, a program of free, drop-in creative writing classes in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, British Columbia. She is the editor and publisher of five chapbooks from the Collective and coeditor of V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2012), which was shortlisted for the 2012 City of Vancouver Book Award. Gardiner’s writing, which appears in North American anthologies and publications, earned the 2011 Lina Chartrand Poetry Award. A version of “Doppelgänger” appeared in Emerge (Simon Fraser University Press, 2009).

If you are interested in learning about anatomical donation and its role in medical education, visit the website for the Anatomical Gift Program at HMS.

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