Reply #21: Pediatric surgeons are quite different from other surgeons - they generally have to be good at [View All]

[kath]

talking with parents, answering all their questions, calming their fears, etc. And they tend to like and be good with kids. Peds surg doesn't tend to attract the jocko frat boy assholes I mentioned in my previous post.

on edit -- read about this peds surgeon - one of the most kickass, wonderful people I've ever met:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/locallegends/Biographies/Ternberg_Jessie.html

She got into a surgery residency by mistake - they thought her name was "Jesse" (male), not "Jessie" and were surprised when a woman showed up!

(on edit, again - perhaps I didn't get that story *quite* right:
During her internship at Boston City Hospital in 1954, Jessie L. Ternberg decided that she wanted to be a surgeon. But she could not find a surgical residency program that would even consider an application from a woman. In desperation, she wrote to Carl Moyer, the head of surgery at her own medical school, Washington University in St. Louis. "I told him I thought it was a bum rap they wouldn't take women," Ternberg says. "He agreed—and he accepted me."

But when she arrived in St. Louis and attempted to check in, she was told there were no women on the list of surgical residents. Ternberg wondered if Moyer had told anyone else that he had accepted her. "It was hot as hell and I was standing there with all my belongings in a suitcase. I thought, 'Now what'll I do?'"

She was, in fact, on the list. The name "Jessie" had caused the confusion. This would continue to be an annoyance, because with each milestone in her career at Washington University, she would be the first of her gender to get there: first woman chief resident, first woman surgeon on the faculty, first woman to head the medical school faculty council. She took a leading role in establishing the Division of Pediatric Surgery and was named its chief in 1972." http://magazine.wustl.edu/Fall02/JessieTernberg.html