Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life

Now it’s not at all unusual for doctors to begin their careers knowing they want to do something in addition to practicing medicine. In fact, a dean at Harvard Medical School tells incoming students to begin thinking from the outset of their careers about what their “hyphen” will be: Physician-scientist? Physician-educator? Physician-advocate?

“You can’t get there fast enough,” she used to say, “and you can’t get there slow enough.” You approach the room not knowing whether you’re about to be relieved or punched in the gut.

But instead of doing what most people would do when they think they need therapy, call their insurance company to find out which therapists are covered, ask friends for referrals, see their primary care provider, I did what most doctors would do, which is to say that I asked for help while pretending I didn’t actually need help.

The students who had watched an instructional video before the role-play were, in fact, more likely to ask the standardized patient about her social supports and to offer pain medication, and less likely to interrupt her. Most impressive to me, I noticed that students, who were, no doubt, empathic people in real life, didn’t necessarily know how to

I told her about an essay by the poet Donald Hall, who, in his eighties and anticipating his own death, felt a resurgence of grief for his late wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, who had died many years earlier. Hall’s grief was compounded by the realization that his wife would not be there to comfort him at the end of his life as he had been able to comf

It’s often noted that “practice” as it relates to medicine has two meanings: the act of caring for patients and the doctor’s never-ending process of perfecting his or her craft. But there’s a third meaning, too, one I’m only now appreciating as I contemplate the end of my career. Medicine is a practice in the way that yoga or meditation is for many

As my colleague Jim predicted, I found my initially rigid standards nearly impossible to meet over time. After all, a doctor is not simply a repository of information but a human being with a personality, a sense of humor, and a point of view.

I knew that these patients, the so-called worried well, no less than the very ill patients I’d once taken care of, were worthy of my compassion and reassurance, but I found myself struggling to provide it. Didn’t these people understand how lucky they were? The gap between what I knew I should feel and what I actually felt distressed me.

In 1995, relatively free from the shackles of the computer screen that now demands so much of doctors’ attention, the main obstacle Weinberg faces in engaging the troubled young woman is his own willingness to do so. His leisurely conversations with her seem as quaint to us now as black bags and glass hypodermics.

The commodities I struggle to ration are my own time and energy.