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

Still, the moment when Weinberg takes the plunge, when he asks the woman about pastry, is very familiar. It’s a moment every clinician has inhabited and, all too often, pulled back from—a threshold we fear crossing. We imagine ourselves, now, in Weinberg’s place, and recognize a double bind, a new doctor’s dilemma: if we ask about the pastry, we fa

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.

I now see that everything I have ever felt good about—

In exchange for this independence we followed a set of unstated but universally understood rules: •Do not complain •Do not ask for help, except when a patient is about to die and you can’t think of anything else to do •Do not acknowledge exhaustion, hunger, thirst, the need to go to the bathroom and, most especially, menstrual cramps •Display a cal

pastry, we avoid the kind of intimacy that not only helps the patient, but also nourishes us and keeps us from feeling burned out.

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.

the discomfort I felt then was not the loss of but the return to myself.

Rachel Naomi Remen, who once observed,

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