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

It took decades, and therapy, for me to understand that to certain men—my husband, for example—the loud, messy, poorly contained me was sexier than those two fastidious girls with their hanging plants. It seems so obvious now, and yet I held then an unshakable conviction that I was not as attractive, as feminine as they were.

Slow suicide may indeed be the intention of certain noncompliant patients. Fear of pain and complications or side effects and the high cost of prescription medication and inadequate insurance coverage, not to mention skepticism about science and mistrust of doctors, are, no doubt, much more common. Yet when I’ve probed deeply into a patient’s reaso

Daughters can’t bear to think of their mothers as weak or vulnerable.

She, too, took pleasure in words but it was a different pleasure than my father’s. Hers was the storyteller’s pleasure: not in the words themselves but in wrapping up life in them and presenting it, brightened and enhanced, to someone else.

I find my patients much more interesting than their diseases.

I have wasted much time and energy in my career looking for reassurance that I was not a fraud and, specifically, that I had more to offer my patients than the qualities they seemed to value most.

Patients often ask me about matters not within my expertise.

When healthy, they still bring in printouts and lists, but these no longer bother me. I now recognize them as expressions of anxiety about mortality—also serious stuff.

She told me that when she’d started her own compulsory therapy, she’d noticed that in the presence of her therapist she could feel the air circulating on her forearms, as if she’d developed new and superior powers of perception.