The Beauty in Breaking by Michele Harper

Harper’s memoir explores her own path to healing, told with compassion and urgency through interactions with her patients. She went on to work at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx and the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Philadelphia. She writes, “I figured that if I could find stillness in this chaos, if I could find love beyond this violence, if I could heal these layers of wounds, then I would be the doctor in my own emergency room.”Īfter a childhood in Washington, D.C., she studied at Harvard University and the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University. While she waited for her brother she watched and marveled as injured patients were rushed in for treatment, while others left healed.

She says writing became not only a salve to dramatic life changes but a means of healing from the journey that led her to pursue emergency medicine as a career.Ī teenage Harper had newly received her learner’s permit when she drove her brother, bleeding from a bite wound inflicted by their father during a fight, to the ER.

Harper, who has worked as an ER physician for more than a decade, said she found her own life broken when she began writing “The Beauty in the Breaking.” Her marriage had ended, and she had moved to Philadelphia to begin a new job. She writes, “If I were to evolve, I would have to regard his brokenness genuinely and my own tenderly, and then make the next best decision.” The experience leads her to reflect on the often underreported assaults on front-line medical workers and her own healing and growth as a physician. In another passage, Harper recounts an incident in which a patient unexpectedly turns violent and attacks her during an examination.

The Beauty in Breaking by Michele Harper