Empathy by David Johnston

Author:David Johnston [Johnston, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2023-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

Collaboration on Concussion

Sharon Jr., our middle child, early on showed herself to be both healer and helper. We have one marvellous photograph of her sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor with ten slices of bread around in two rows of five in front of her flanked by a large jar of peanut-butter. She was making sandwiches for her elder and younger sisters’ school lunches, while the family dog salivated nearby. Just six years old, she built a system to do the job she figured needed doing, unasked. Everyone got fed and, as I recall, none of the girls choked on dog hair. It was no surprise to any of us that Sharon Jr. ended up as a medical doctor, given her trademark combination of acute curiosity and compassion, and extraordinary discipline, and yet her path to become a medical professional was indirect.

At Harvard she earned her undergraduate honours degree in arts, majoring in government and played two varsity sports. From there she went to Cambridge to study law. She returned home to McGill and completed a master’s degree in law and bioethics while also serving on the research ethics board of the Douglas Hospital. She took several science courses with excellent grades and similarly high scores on the Medical College Admissions Test, and then applied to McGill medicine. She was not admitted. Her grades were fine, but the interviewing committee expressed a concern that, with such a varied background, she lacked a laser focus on medicine. At the time I was McGill’s former principal, so I guess her rejection proved the independence of admissions decisions. But as Sharon’s subsequent career trajectory demonstrated, her breadth of education and experience plus her determination to ask questions and answer them were important assets that would help her become a leader and innovator in medicine. She unites all four aspects of the four-sided health-care model we described above.

With a glowing recommendation from McGill’s former dean of medicine, for whom she worked as a part-time research assistant, she went to study medicine at Dartmouth College, one of the smallest medical schools in the United States. It is a jewel, whose dean of admissions told her they admitted a group of students each year with non-traditional backgrounds—this was a risk, but one they stood behind. She flourished there. Her master’s of law thesis had addressed legal and ethical dilemmas in modern medicine, in which she had taken a profound interest while working with the former dean of medicine on examining, modernizing, and teaching professionalism for physicians.

Years earlier, Sharon Jr. had been deeply moved by the death of her grandmother, Joan Downey, of congestive heart failure. Studying law at Cambridge at the time, she got the news that Granny was failing, and booked the first flight home from the United Kingdom, calling in on one of her stopovers to talk to her grandmother but, alas, arriving too late to be at her bedside. From that point on, her mother and I could see Sharon Jr.’s awakening drive to move from law on its own to law and medicine combined.

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