When the Script Is Not Enough: A reflection about clinical interviews by medicat student Macie Garner

In physician Chloe Nazra Lee’s essay “’I Love You’ in Cantonese,” a psychiatry trainee worries she has failed at interviewing. Instead of correcting her technique, her attending offers unexpected advice: Stop worrying about the checklist and just talk to the patient. Clinical interviews, he suggests, are not only about completion but about making room for connection. In that space, conversation itself can become therapeutic, not only for the patient but also for the clinician.

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The Voice that Lingers: On role models, inheritance, and the impact that outlives us: A reflection by emergency medicine pioneer Kenneth Iserson

No one decides to become a role model. That is rather the point. As psychiatrist Jacob Freedman observes in his Crossroads essay “I am not a Role Model,” only a Charles Barkley can disown the title; the people who actually shape us—parents, grandparents, the half-remembered branches of a family tree—never get the option. Freedman’s father did not announce himself as the reason his son became a physician. He simply was the reason, the best person in his son’s entire world, and the choice followed as naturally as breathing. The acts of the forefathers, an ancient maxim holds, are symbolic for their children. Identity is inherited before it is chosen.

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Marking the Firsts and Reflecting on "What Now?" by OB/GYN Physician, Dr. I. Cori Baill

Writing Late reminded me how impactful are the firsts of medical education; the first time one works with a cadaver, is coached through the delivery of a baby, or finds oneself running the code.  Late draws from my internship on the GYN oncology service, entrusted to manage patients at the end of their lives.

At the other end of those decades, I now find myself thinking about the impact I have as an attending.

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