konfrstcz

I agree, there's no way we can tell you if you'd make a good doctor or not, that's really something only you can answer. As far as the stress and grossness (for lack of a better word), as long as you don't become violently ill at the sight of blood, it's really something you do just get used to. Dissecting the cadaver is your first brush with death in med school and for some reason, it doesn't seem like a dead person. It's been preserved and it takes on a different overall appearance. Either that or I just felt like that as a defense mechanism.

Being around sick people all the time also isn't really all that bad. First of all, in many branches of medicine, you spend a lot of time with healthy people trying to help them make good choices to stay healthy and safe. And if you love that part of it, you just choose to specialize that way instead of say, oncology with everyone having cancer. And it's pretty fantastic when you actually truly cure someone! I had a tee shirt from some med school organization with the quote "To cure sometimes, to heal often and to care always" - I always thought that summed it up nicely.

From the wording in your post, I don't think you're in America, so I don't know what the process is with schools for you, but my advice to my patients that ask is, take the right classes in college, see if you still want to do it and then go for it!

I found a website that explains the cauceus:

Many "medical" organisations use a symbol of a short rod entwined by two snakes and topped by a pair of wings, which is actually the caduceus or magic wand of the Greek god Hermes (Roman Mercury), messenger of the gods, inventor of (magical) incantations, conductor of the dead and protector of merchants and thieves.

The link between the caduceus of Hermes (Mercury) and medicine seems to have arisen by the seventh century A.D., when Hermes had come to be linked with alchemy. Alchemists were referred to as the sons of Hermes, as Hermetists or Hermeticists and as "practitioners of the hermetic arts". There are clear occult associations with the caduceus.

The caduceus was the magic staff of Hermes (Mercury), the god of commerce, eloquence, invention, travel and theft, and so was a symbol of heralds and commerce, not medicine. The words caduity & caducous imply temporality, perishableness and senility, while the medical profession espouses renewal, vitality and health.

Just for an FYI, the same site explained a different symbol (I hadn't realized this and found it interesting):

Professional and patient centred organisations (such as the NZMA, in fact most medical Associations around the world including the World Health Organization) use the "correct" and traditional symbol of medicine, the staff of Asclepius with a single serpent encircling a staff, classically a rough-hewn knotty tree limb. Asclepius (an ancient greek physician deified as the god of medicine) is traditionally depicted as a bearded man wearing a robe that leaves his chest uncovered and holding a staff with his sacred single serpent coiled around it, (example right) symbolizing renewal of youth as the serpent casts off its skin. The single serpent staff also appears on a Sumerian vase of c. 2000 B.C. representing the healing god Ningishita, the prototype of the Greek Asklepios. However, there is a more practical origin postulated which makes sense

Hope that helps, good luck