Letter to a Young Female Physician Quotes

“It’s a moment every clinician has inhabited and, all too often, pulled back from—a threshold we fear crossing. We imagine ourselves, [...], and recognize a double bind, a new doctor’s dilemma: if we ask about [a patient's interest/personal information], we fall hopelessly behind in administrative tasks and feel more burned out. If we don’t ask about [it], we avoid the kind of intimacy that not only helps the patient, but also nourishes us and keeps us from feeling burned out.”
― Suzanne Koven, Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life

“Who will I be when I have fewer patients? When I have no patients at all? It's often noted that "practice" as it relates to medicine has two meanings: the act of caring for patients and the doctor's never-ending process of perfecting his or her craft. But there's a third meaning, too, one I'm only now appreciating as I contemplate the end of my career. Medicine is a practice in the way that yoga or meditation is for many people, an activity repeated so often that it becomes a kind of incantation. I have, for so long, stood to my patients' right sides as physicians have done for centuries, palpated the lymph nodes in their necks, armpits, and groins; auscultated their hearts and lungs; asked the same questions I first learned to ask nearly forty years ago—What makes the pain better? What makes it worse? These rituals are for me an anchor without which I fear I might simply drift away. Of course I suspected all along that what I feared wasn't abandoning my patients, but myself.”
― Suzanne Koven, Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life

“It’s unnecessary and undesirable to limit our readings to medically related texts (she notes that when reading Ivan Ilyich doctors get bogged down arguing about whether the title character of Tolstoy’s novella had gastric cancer or pancreatic cancer, missing the point entirely); that literature helps dismantle the “hidden curriculum,” the teaching that our patients are somehow fundamentally different from us and we from them; that immersing ourselves in imaginary worlds populated by imaginary people and investing emotionally in their problems is excellent training for empathy.”
― Suzanne Koven, Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life

“I wonder whether, just as we take recertification exams every few years, we might be required, at intervals, to rewrite our medical school admissions essays, to articulate at each stage of our careers just what sort of doctors we aspire to be. Origin myths are meant to be retold and reinterpreted again and again.”
― Suzanne Koven, Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life

“I thought back to those days, the more mystified and ashamed I felt about my complicity in a system that had so little regard for me. “That’s where you’re wrong,” said Edward. “They loved you. And me too. We were stars. We made them look good and they heaped praise on us. But at some level we knew how easily we might be discarded if we made a wrong step. That’s why we worked so hard to be perfect.”
― Suzanne Koven, Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life

“We walked through the hospital corridors on the way to these sessions hoping that we wouldn’t be mistaken for doctors—and also hoping that we would.”
― Suzanne Koven, Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life