04/09/08

 

BY HAYLEY RUTGER

After 11 weeks of romantic drama, intellectual tension—and nerd humor—the case of the 11-Sentence Medical Mystery is closed.

Third-year medical student Emma Bakes wrote the final winning sentence, ending the contest begun in January by the School of Medicine's Biomedical Ethics & Medical Humanities Scholarly Concentration. Bakes' sentence was revealed April 3 at the annual Stanford Writers Forum, and the full story is now online, along with the names of the 11 people who won each weekly contest for their single-sentence contribution. The winners were cited at the forum for their efforts cramming a novel's worth of humor and suspense into the patchwork tale of medical intrigue.

The contest drew all age groups and crowds from within Stanford's medical community, said fourth-year medical student Donna Tversky, who oversaw the contest. A sampling of the winners included Christine Kurihara, manager of special projects at the Program in Biodesign; Sahar Rooholamini, a fourth-year medical student, and a couple of Stanford spouses. Tversky said several medical school alumni also sent in sentences.

The full story and the winners' names are available online at http://bioethics.stanford.edu/arts/Med_mystery.html.

Choosing the final winner "was a close call," said Tversky. She said the judging committee of five medical students—not including her—rarely agreed which sentence was best. "I could never predict what the winning sentence would be," said Tversky. On a good week, the committee had 10 candidate sentences to judge.

Bakes, whose final sentence beat 10 competitors, said she was "thrilled to pieces to win," adding, "The stuff that people had come up with before was so perfect, I had to contribute." She said she loved the main characters, Dr. Spanish Trueblood and his fiery ex-wife, Dr. Anna Della Riddle.

Their story began with a clinical nightmare, in which Trueblood contracted the neurological disease he had tried to fight—the disease he believed had killed his ex-wife. Then his lady came strutting back into the scene in red heels, mysteriously alive and furious that Trueblood had taken credit for their collaborative research. Bakes finished the story in one zinging sentence explaining why Della Riddle still lived and whether she had returned out of vengeance or kindness to inject him with a cure.

"He was dead and his multicolored lunacy yielded to an eternity in darkness before he lurched back to life," the sentence began, "where the first person he saw was Anna, tucking her copy of Cell between his teeth, then walking out of his life forever, adding: 'The prototype you covertly injected into me five years ago induces brief cardiopulmonary arrest, until traces of cardiac troponin engage as the cofactor to complete the vaccine and it kick starts the heart, but I'm surprised it worked on you, since it requires a heart and you definitely don't have one.'"

Fiction writer and Stanford medical intern Josh Spanogle, MD, began the story. Now, he said, "It has gone in a direction that I never in my wildest dreams would have imagined, which is the joy of one of these experiences." Tversky agreed that the plot surprises were a lot of fun, along with over-the-top drama and geeky doctor humor. "You get to throw in your protein synthesis jokes," she said, and that kind of silliness gives Stanford's industrious medical crowd a chance to unwind.

To choose between submissions, committee member Jenya Kaufman looked at writing style, grammar, and how each sentence fit into the larger story. She commended Bakes' ending. "I think it just tied everything together in a very funny way, and it wasn't just an—'Oh, it was all a dream.'" Bakes won a $50 gift certificate to the Stanford Bookstore for her ending sentence, and the earlier winners received $25 certificates.

Tversky suggested the Medical Mystery was a such success that the medical school should repeat it. The idea for the contest came from Audrey Shafer, published poet and co-director of the biomedical ethics and humanities group. Shafer judged a similar contest at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and later brought the concept to Stanford's medical school.

The contest was sponsored by the Arts, Humanities and Medicine Program of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics and also supported by a grant from the Drs. Ben and A. Jess Shenson Funds.

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Hayley Rutger is a science-writing intern in the Office of Communication & Public Affairs in the School of Medicine.