Doing Right

The Class of 2010’s student speakers took to the stage on Class Day, using a combination of humor, thoughtfulness and nostalgia to usher their fellow graduates into the next phase of their careers. Each year, two students from HMS and one from HSDM are chosen by their classmates to deliver remarks at commencement.

In his talk, titled “2:30,” HSDM grad Robert Tarby Jr. faced that scourge familiar to all dentists and dentists-in-training: the dentist joke. The title of his speech comes from the one about the best time to visit the dentist (2:30, or tooth-hurty).

Tarby acknowledged that some jokes can be hurtful. “What do you call a doctor who didn’t get into medical school?” he said. “A dentist? Ouch!” But rather than dwell on the unfairness of such cracks, Tarby instead reflected on why dentists might be the target of so many jokes.

The mouth is a unique part of our anatomy, Tarby said. It has an aesthetic quality that communicates health, well-being and status, and that can make patients self-conscious or apologetic about the state of their mouths, even in front of people who have chosen to work with the mouth for a living. The jokes, Tarby argued, are a way to ease not only physical discomfort but also the fear and anxiety that comes from granting the dentist permission to enter such an intimate space.

In a speech titled “Remember the Patient,” Kiran Gupta shared how two experiences—working on healthcare reform at the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in Washington, D.C., and being a patient—made her realize what kind of doctor she wanted to be.

“We must remember that we are bound, from this day forward, to do right by our patients,” Gupta said. She admitted that the current healthcare system does not make this easy. She took a year away from HMS to work at the IOM, but it wasn’t until she became a “problem patient,” one with the invisible disorder of unexplained pain, that she truly understood how poorly the system worked.

“My distress as a patient was compounded by the knowledge that I, too, would eventually be a clinician practicing in the same flawed system,” she said. Eventually, she found a doctor who could serve as a model for the kind she wanted to be, even within a system that doesn’t always seem to view as paramount the patient’s best interests.

“We must lead a generation of doctors to shape the system that will best serve our patients,” Gupta said.

Lauren Gilstrap, in her talk, titled “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants,” reminded her classmates how they got to where they are today. She reflected on some of the more memorable aspects of the past four years, from the quirkiest of preclinical professors to the espresso-fueled trials of clerkship, along with the changes the world has seen since they started medical school.

“But we are sitting here today only in part because of where we’ve been,” said Gilstrap. She paid homage to the giants of medicine who preceded her class, such as Oliver Wendell Holmes and Francis Peabody; but the title of her speech, she said, actually referred to the giants among them on that day—the parents who had somehow managed not to kill them as teenagers, the husbands and wives who put up with “grossly inappropriate cocktail party conversations.”

The giants of today, said Gilstrap, “are the ones who have inspired us, and the ones who helped us inspire others.”