Abstract

I hated my outpatient primary care clinic during residency. Every Wednesday at noon, I scrambled to finish my inpatient work in the hospital, to raggedly see my patients, to sign out my unfinished errands to the covering residents, and to leave the children’s hospital, heading north up the dilapidated thoroughfare to the federally qualified health center where my residency clinic was held. The noise of the street, the honking of the cars, the shouts of the pedestrians, the extremes of cold and of heat: after hiding in the sanctity of the university, the five-minute march up to clinic immersed me in the battlefield of the South Side of Chicago. The march prepared me for the chaos that awaited me in the...