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Background: Every applicant and subsequent trainee in medicine is interrogated and asked to self-interrogate the question of “Why medicine?” innumerable times throughout their journeys. Answers arrive in the form of narratives that we produce and refine through training and experience. However, in practice these self-making narratives possess elements of uncertain provenance and are often repeated, revised, and occasionally abandoned as trainees progress. While the field of narrative medicine emphasizes patient stories, less attention has been given to how trainees speak about themselves and what happens to those voices when they are asked to consolidate meaning. 

Methods: Thirty-two third-year medical students participated in semi-structured interviews centered on the central question of “Why medicine?” These interviews were not transcribed or coded according to traditional methods, but instead were reworked through poetic inquiry into a chapbook of 43 poems. The poems provide responses rather than summaries. They are attempts to hold voice, omission, and contradiction, while acknowledging that an attempt to present another’s story is also an intervention.

Results: Students did not offer single explanations that resist destabilization. Instead, their narratives moved between borrowed language of altruism, service, calling; that of specific memory such as illness, mentorship, and socioeconomic contingency; as well as moments where meaning stalled or self-contradicted. In poetic form, these instabilities became more present. Identity became a project of provisional assemblage. The process of writing also emphasized the problem of authorship: what it means to speak with someone else’s voice without attempting to resolve ideas into cleaner forms.

Conclusions: This project suggests that the demand for a stable “why medicine” narrative, a ubiquitous component of socialization in medical school, may be misaligned with the realities of medical training. Poetic inquiry offers a way of engaging voice without attempting to force coherence, preserving contradiction and perhaps more accurately reflecting the experience of becoming a physician.