I had probably carried the desire to study medicine with me for a while.

But since it seemed discouraged and unimaginative to me to take up the profession of my parents and many of their friends, who are both doctors, I hid this wish with great success – and best of all from myself interested in the somewhat abstract subjects of math, German, and history, but disliked biology, it struck me as a mundane product of lackluster work in laboratories.

And so it took someone else to help me resolve my misgivings and superficial dislikes.

In Ian McEwan's Atonement I read about the young Robbie Turner who in 1935, with the support of the gentleman whose family his mother works as a cleaner for, decides to pursue medicine after completing his literary studies.

As he approaches the mansion on a hot summer evening, he dreams of the “weathered, wise doctor” he will be and the “travelling and reflecting life” that will be behind him.

As cheesy as it may sound (or be), my heart pounded to read that the physician, like literature, is devoted to the "rise and fall," "the wretchedness and nobility of mankind," that religion and Although literature teaches how to deal with people in this way, it is merely an "engrossing parlor game".

One of the great authors of the 21st century had taken everything profane from medicine before my eyes, he had even placed it above the beauty of the otherworldly thinking, which I had previously considered the highest.

Now I knew that I wanted to be a doctor and why: Because a good doctor is one who has studied the great works of literature.

Don't take any language risks

Shame and uncertainty gave way to enthusiastic anticipation.

And so I enrolled at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität for the coming winter semester.

But despite all the enthusiasm, there were also moments of reflection, although they only rarely interrupted the rapid and unpredictable change from tense expectation to sheer panic in view of my imminent departure and new start in a foreign city.

In those moments, I sometimes had the suspicion that Robbie Turner's crushes, which McEwan may have served to add to the drama of the catastrophe that the novel is heading towards and which robs Robbie Turner first of his future and then of his life, might be even more dramatic would not have too much to do with my everyday student life, perhaps with my entire medical work.

Although in the months that passed before the start of my first semester, I had reason and opportunity to put my enthusiasm into perspective and often suspected that I should not directly infer my everyday study life from the lines just quoted, my first few contained Disappointing findings for weeks at the medical faculty: Language, writing and speaking are used by students and lecturers as unwelcome instruments that are considered outdated and whose use should be avoided as far as possible.

But if one cannot avoid formulating a sentence, then it should be as ambiguous and vague as possible;

under no circumstances should one risk having to react in any way to what is written or said.

Textbook texts and any other form of written representation will rightly soon be scarce and will hopefully be a thing of the past, after all, most things can only be represented by diagrams and illustrations, whereas reading is exhausting and one constantly runs the risk of no longer dealing with the superficial to be content with repeating what has been learned.

I found myself in a desert devoid of any sophisticated linguistic elaboration, any well-spoken word, ultimately the invaluable culture of giving an account of what was said.

no longer content with the superficial reproduction of what has been learned.

I found myself in a desert devoid of any sophisticated linguistic elaboration, any well-spoken word, ultimately the invaluable culture of giving an account of what was said.

no longer content with the superficial reproduction of what has been learned.

I found myself in a desert devoid of any sophisticated linguistic elaboration, any well-spoken word, ultimately the invaluable culture of giving an account of what was said.

"The word" has two meanings in German.

On the one hand it stands for the individual term, the vocabulary, on the other hand for a whole statement or explanation as in the thank you or foreword.

The "German Dictionary" by the Brothers Grimm already assigned the plural forms of words and words to these two meanings: Words are several concepts, while words are utterances and explanations.

Although medicine will never do without the many names for anatomical structures, physiological processes, biochemical compounds, diseases and therapies, i.e. never without words, its teaching at least is well on the way to becoming a dubious pleasure without words.

Oskar Mahler

(19 years old) studies medicine at the University of Münster.

When he's not getting lost in the details, he's searching between questions and answers - well, what actually?