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?

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog,” E. L. Doctorow once observed. “You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” The same might be said of becoming a doctor—and a person.

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

it may not seem like it, but all your parents want is for you to be happy.

it’s unfair to expect women to work full-time simply because they happen to be the ones who disproportionately choose to work in fields where there’s a shortage of doctors. It’s also unfair that women often feel they need to work part-time because they, on average, assume more responsibility for childcare and housekeeping than their male partners.

But if I didn’t work in the clinic I feared another kind of erasure: the denial of the doctor I had been for most of my adult life. Where did this feeling come from? Medical school. Part of the curriculum, no less essential than anatomy and physiology, is the teaching that physicians do not turn away from human suffering. Others may avoid the sickl

Don’t waste your time on nonsense. Don’t waste your life.

She didn’t fear death—in my experience few old people do. But she wished she could stay around long enough to know “how the story ends,” as she put it: how her grandchildren and great grandchildren turned out; when America would finally elect a woman president, if her garden would ever be as lush as she’d always hoped it would be. But the story nev

“I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends,” says Dr. Rieux. “For the moment I know this; there are sick people and they need curing.”