A Love of Medicine Aris Raj Agarwala

Having been surrounded by numerous physicians and surgeons in my family, I have been enamored by the prospect of becoming a doctor since childhood. My father, seeing this, allowed me to spend a couple of my weekends shadowing him at his clinic in Irvington where I, a simple nine year-old child, was entranced by his skillful manipulation of peculiar instruments and mellifluous ramblings of terms like “applanation tonometry” and “digital retinography.” Of course, as an adolescent, this desire to become a physician manifested itself in reverence and wonder for the machines and jargon. However, as I began to mature and undergo metanoia through Catholicism, my perspective of medicine changed from a field where humans heal others to a field where humans mirror the healing miracles of Jesus Christ. As a devout Catholic, I viewed physicians as angels whose blessed hands manage to piece together lives bound and consecrated by God Himself. Thus, to me, medicine transcends the simple aspect of helping people and becomes a righteous career of defending the vulnerable and healing the sick as Christ did: a perspective which impels me to walk amongst my fellow physician and join the army devoted to mankind.

Throughout high school, I was given...