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

Maybe we resent our patients’ list-making because we feel they’re usurping our role, trespassing on our territory.

For many years my colleague Dr. Kate Treadway has run a course called “Introduction to the Profession” for first-year students at Harvard Medical School. Within days of their arrival, students are sent to speak with hospitalized patients. They can ask the patients anything, but there’s one question they’re required to ask: What advice would you giv

See in the face of every patient the face of someone you love.

take me many more years to understand about myself as a doctor and then as a writer: that I can only be who I am. And that this is OK.

Now brooding is not enough. Doctors are supposed to “suffer with” our patients, to feel what they feel. The word most often used to describe this requisite is “empathy.” It’s a relatively new word, first introduced a century ago by a German psychologist and translated from Einfühlung, “feeling-in.” Empathy seems to have replaced “sympathy,” which h

The American Medical Association’s Code of Ethics states: “Physicians generally should not treat themselves or members of their immediate families.”

I reflected later that without calling it such, Maurice and I had participated in the relatively new model of shared decision-making in which patient preferences are taken as much into account as doctors’ recommendations.

Empathy may be as simple as remembering to say the right thing or, as the medical student I observed in “Giving Bad News” failed to do, remembering not to say the wrong one.

the unbearable about-ness of being. By “about-ness” I meant that I felt disconnected from myself, abstracted from my own life.

how reading increases empathy, decreases burnout, or even makes you a nicer person. These may be true, but for me, reading—now that I am truly a reader—has a more profound effect: it effaces the boundaries between me and my colleagues, between me and my patients, and also between me and my many selves. When I’m doing it right, reading makes me feel