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.

We spent considerable time in those days comparing ourselves unfavorably to one another. We’d all been top students in our high schools and colleges, able to learn all the material in any course. Now even the most hardworking among us could barely keep up. Except that each of us felt especially inadequate.

When someone you love suffers, you’ve failed to protect them. This may

What it’s a perfect example of is that doctors shouldn’t take care of their own families.

even at one of the world’s great academic medical centers you can easily declare yourself an expert in a condition that no one else wants to deal with.

I wondered aloud if Margaret might be experiencing a similar resurgence of grief for Paul as she faced her own mortality.

As scientific knowledge and technology advanced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, what it meant to be a doctor changed. Michel Foucault’s insight about this change is well summarized by psychiatrist and medical historian Abraham Nussbaum: Foucault described the moment when physicians combined dissection with clinical practice as

To acknowledge this shift, there was a movement a few years ago in which doctors were encouraged to refer to patients as “clients.” This term, which psychotherapists often use, is meant to imply a respectful, collaborative relationship in which the medical professional doesn’t hold disproportionate power. But the term never caught on with

over 50 percent of American medical students now are women and in some fields, such as pediatrics, women now make up at least three-quarters of all trainees.