The space between: training future doctors to interrogate subtext

<p dir="ltr">“Don’t look for meaning in the words. Listen to the silences” said Samuel Beckett, the great Irish playwright and novelist; and with this insight into his oeuvre, Beckett reminds us that silences hold doors open in dialogue, inviting us through. But what is to be learned beyond these doorframes, within the silences, in those spaces between words? Beckett’s friend and contemporary Harold Pinter once remarked, “Underneath what is said, something else is being said,” and this <i>something</i> unsaid by our patients could be anything from a competing narrative or alternative perspective to a different, more important issue loitering just beyond a silent doorway, waiting to be heard. As doctors we can go through only the doors that we can see; but when we do, when we hear the subtext, we might see farther and with greater clarity.