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

A psychiatrist colleague tells me that such moments, when there’s a clear mismatch between what a patient says and the intensity of feeling with which he or she says it, are especially ripe for probing.

in my marriage, my parenting, my writing, and my doctoring—has been the work of the loud, curvy, curly headed girl, operating on instinct and without self-consciousness. And every wrong turn I’ve ever taken has been in pursuit of those hanging plants, symbols of the woman I thought I was supposed to be. Curvy Curly always wins. Always.

Chekhov, a practicing doctor during his short but prolific career as a playwright and master of short fiction, famously said that medicine was his wife and literature was his mistress.

Patients often ask me about matters not within my expertise.

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

I was unable to move forward until I’d named what I wanted to leave behind.

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

It was only hard work when he had to break off the motion, which had become unconscious, and to think.

My mother often commented that when you consider everything that could go wrong with the human body it’s amazing that anything goes right—and for her things mostly had gone right.