Andrew Kim. Image: Aaron Washington
This essay was written for the 2017-2018 HMS Dean's Report in answer to the question "What is the promise of medicine to me?"
During the presidency of Park Chung-Hee in South Korea in the 1960s and ‘70s, my grandfather was interrogated for political opposition. Upon release, he learned that our family would be interrogated in a more “traditional” style, and he immediately determined to escape the following day.
With five children and carrying only seven suitcases, my grandparents left behind their livelihood in Korea. They sought new beginnings in America, in West Los Angeles, where they made a humble living as convenience store owners. My grandfather succumbed to cancer soon after arriving in the U.S., trying to navigate death in a confusing and foreign land. My college-aged father and grandmother continued to run the store.
The promise of medicine rests within its unique capacity to serve as a bridge to peace.
This family backdrop of political and inner resilience guided my entry into medicine. As a young man, I discovered a buried trove of literature on “health as a bridge to peace,” which showed me the promising nexus between medicine and political resilience. Through this new lens, my existing friendship with a South Sudanese doctor, Chol Makur, evolved into a partnership as co-founders of a medical social venture in South Sudan.
During graduate school, this lens led me to conduct research with the Liberian Ministry of Health during the Ebola outbreak. Closer to my ancestral home on the Korean Peninsula, we helped conduct the first systematic review of health literature in North Korea and organized North Korea’s first international surgical symposium. We brought together neurosurgeons from 12 countries with North Korean neurosurgeons to share research. An intangible value surfaced as surgeons from many nations learned to look beyond the media’s caricatured portrayals of “the other,” and instead connected in shared humanity as clinicians. It taught me an early lesson in health diplomacy as a rare opportunity to share love across barriers often deemed impenetrable.
I also discovered medicine’s role for healing across other seemingly impenetrable barriers at an individual level. In our longitudinal clerkship, I met a 50-year-old woman named Rosa during her diagnosis with incurable metastatic angiosarcoma.
At each clinic visit she snapped in anger—at God, the health care system she had trusted, the unfairness of it all—and she refused to speak with us about her illness. I recalled the advice of a palliative care mentor, “don’t just do something… sit there.” And so we tried.
For nine months, I would stop by the infusion room on Friday mornings to sit with Rosa to chat about the latest David McCullough book, play Rummy 500 or trade gardening tips. Though I had studied assiduously on the science of angiosarcoma, it was through these immensely human experiences that we could broach the conversations that would help her find peace at the end of life.
Reflecting upon my time at HMS, similar humanistic endeavors stand out most—organizing our anatomical donor memorial service, coordinating a course on medical reflective practice called The Healer’s Art, and leading multiple retreats for an interdisciplinary group of fellows through the Harvard Graduate School Leadership Institute. My past work in “health as a bridge to peace” had now flipped to “peace as a bridge to health.”
Professionally, this experience has modeled for me a new purpose—to serve as a bridge for people affected by serious illness to live out their lives meaningfully. For me, primary care serves as this ultimate bridge in medicine. It resides at the intersection between my passions of longitudinal human relationships, advocacy for underserved communities and rigorous scientific inquiry. And so, my hope is to pursue a tightly interwoven career in primary care, palliative care and health diplomacy.
In pursuing this career, I stand firmly in two roots of my family history and professional experience. First, the promise of medicine rests within its unique capacity to serve as a bridge to peace. And second, my contribution to healing arises from both scientific rigor and compassionate presence. With the support of these roots, I hope to facilitate medicine’s ability to bridge conflicts in the two Koreas and elsewhere, and to foster peace within the human experience of serious illness.
