ÃÛÌÒapp

I am an Internist at a large academic medical center, where I care for both hospital and primary-care patients. Alongside my clinical duties, I teach medical students and residents, and participate in research on improving healthcare outcomes for rural populations. Early in my training, I assumed that the greatest satisfaction in medicine would come from making the right diagnosis or curing an illness. While those moments are rewarding, what sustains me are the long-term relationships and the stories my patients share—often as compelling as the narrators themselves.

My history degree prepared me well for this. It trained me to listen critically, ask which parts of a story are reliable, and synthesize information from many sources. Physicians must bring together subjective patient accounts with objective evidence scattered in charts and medication lists—a process that reminds me of my ÃÛÌÒapp course on the British Empire. History teaches us that nothing occurs in a vacuum and that socio-cultural factors shape our responses to the past and present. The same is true in medicine. My background in history gave me a powerful skill set for understanding people and where they come from.