Osler's Razor

[click on the photo to enlarge it]

A week from today, I'm going to enjoy a new challenge: A three-hour ethics workshop for Waco's social workers, through Baylor's excellent school of social work. The event is that school's annual Dyer Ethics Lecture. I'm eager and a little scared, like wading into the ocean at night: the subject is known but the context is not.

I'll be speaking to a group of people I greatly admire. I'm from a family of social workers. My mother works regularly at a social service agency as a volunteer, while both of my siblings have a Masters degree in social work and have worked in a variety of positions in that field. I know what social workers do, and realize that much of it is beyond my abilities.

At one point in my life, I was an associate at a large law firm in Detroit. I was living with my brother, who was working at a hospice for AIDS patients at a time when people with AIDS simply died; that was the only outcome the diagnosis promised. He came home in the evening and we would talk, but we did not talk about our work. We talked about almost anything else, actually. From my perspective, I did not want to talk about spending my day doing discovery on seat belt retractors. From his, I think, there was just too much pain.

Of course, he is my brother. He did not have to tell me much about work. Knowing that all of his clients, the people he worked with every day, that he watched each of them die in turn... he did not have to tell me. Brothers are like that.



I look forward to speaking to the social workers. It will be good; I am committed to that by love and blood.