It wasn’t until medical residency that I began to fast during Lent. While foregoing food from dawn to dusk one day a week for those forty days might have been a creative re-casting of a practice often undertaken unintentionally due to the rigors of training, something about the act of volitionally surrendering a good I might otherwise presume upon felt meaningful.
The power of this practice was amplified, I think, by my observation of the interplay among power, food, and desire around me on a daily basis in the hospital. While contemporary society may be (in some ways, justifiably) apt to divest physicians of the power they have historically wielded over patients, one way this power still remains manifest is in the fact that, as a physician, I can literally forbid another person from eating.
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