It was great to see quite of few of the students that I have taught last year and this year, and one of my students from last year mentioned that the inclusion of sessions on "Medicine and the Law" in the program this year for the first time had stemmed from our discussions last year and my concerns that not very much was said about medicine and the law in the medical curriculum. If time permits, I may write more about the conference later, but the sessions today reminded me that I was asked to present a paper some years back on my reflections on my career as a lawyer and then a doctor. This is reproduced below.
Talk for the Victorian Medical Women’s Society meeting Tuesday 5.9.2006
“Medicine and the Law: Women doctors and lawyers get together for a combined perspective on lives and careers”.
“A Combined Perspective”
A famous Chinese philosopher once said that “even the longest journey begins with the first step” and life itself is a journey, in which at any point we are the sum of all we have been and all the places we have been in that journey. It is the journey itself and not the destination which is important. My personal journey has been a complex one and is still evolving.
As the oldest child in a high-achieving family, the idea of gender bias was a foreign concept and it came as rather a rude shock when the realities of life in the big bad world dawned on me in my mid-teens. I studied maths, science and English in my final years at high school, and, driven by the desire both to be independent and to help people, faced the difficult decision of law or medicine. However as I also enjoyed humanities and languages, law/arts eventually won out on the basis that surely law was logical like science and also a helping vocation. I enjoyed the arts part – Swedish, fine arts, music, but found law dry and boring. I saw the light and tried to change over to medicine, but was too far into my course.
So, I persevered, finished my law degree, honours in Arts and also a Dip.Ed., so I would be qualified to teach others. I found commercial law reasonably interesting, strayed into corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions and completed an MBA shortly before becoming a founding partner of a small law firm. The years that followed were an unsatisfying Herculean struggle with adverse circumstances and my yearning for medicine resurfaced.
When I saw an advertisement for the new graduate entry medical course at the University of Melbourne I knew I had to apply, and was incredibly excited to make it through the arduous selection process and get a rare second chance in life. As a medical student I continued to work in the law firm at every available opportunity to keep things afloat, but ultimately lost everything I had worked so hard for when my then-partner hijacked the firm whilst I undertook a life-changing final-year exchange semester in Oslo, Norway studying women and children’s health. Since then I have kept my legal practising certificate but feel that my true vocation is clinical medicine.
People often ask me if there is anything in common between law and medicine, and if you dip below the surface, yes, there is. Both are professions which in the past have been regarded as honourable vocations which serve society. In both we are often dealing with people’s most pressing problem in life and we need to be good listeners and communicators and to be able to provide appropriate assistance and support. We never know who is going to walk through the door next, and have to be adept in dealing with people across all ages from a wide range of social, language and cultural backgrounds and often their families as well. Frequently people come with high expectations that we will be able to solve all their problems and will voice frustration and annoyance if we can’t. Unlike getting in the plumber or electrician, people often expect everything for nothing and are resentful if they have to pay for medical or legal assistance. As a lawyer it was a continual headache trying to extract payment from clients.
They are also both professions in which high standards of professional ethics and demeanour are expected by society at large. This can bring with it scrutiny at both a personal and professional level and a perception that you are a free resource that is available to be tapped at any time by family, friends and acquaintances, which can raise its own ethical dilemmas.
People often ask me if there is anything in common between law and medicine, and if you dip below the surface, yes, there is. Both are professions which in the past have been regarded as honourable vocations which serve society. In both we are often dealing with people’s most pressing problem in life and we need to be good listeners and communicators and to be able to provide appropriate assistance and support. We never know who is going to walk through the door next, and have to be adept in dealing with people across all ages from a wide range of social, language and cultural backgrounds and often their families as well. Frequently people come with high expectations that we will be able to solve all their problems and will voice frustration and annoyance if we can’t. Unlike getting in the plumber or electrician, people often expect everything for nothing and are resentful if they have to pay for medical or legal assistance. As a lawyer it was a continual headache trying to extract payment from clients.
They are also both professions in which high standards of professional ethics and demeanour are expected by society at large. This can bring with it scrutiny at both a personal and professional level and a perception that you are a free resource that is available to be tapped at any time by family, friends and acquaintances, which can raise its own ethical dilemmas.
In both professions there are requirements for continuing professional education in order to keep up-to-date, which requires the application of time and effort in increasingly time-scarce lives. Especially in the early years when you are establishing your career and climbing the totem pole, long hours and dedication are required whether you are a hospital medical officer or a young lawyer trying to achieve the requisite billable hours, and as we are all aware, there is a price to be paid for this in terms of the freedom to follow your personal interests outside work and being able to dedicate quality time to family and relationships. With such stressful working environments, friendships and support within the workplace can become very important in simply retaining your sanity and the motivation to keep going.
From a gender perspective, there are certainly areas in both law and medicine which remain clearly male-dominated and this throws up real and difficult challenges to overcome. The prevailing cultural benchmarks often have nothing to do with professional skills or aptitude. For instance, as a commercial lawyer you might need to show your prowess at wining and dining clients and knowledgeably discussing the footy and cricket, or when assisting with orthopaedic surgery display your ability to discuss the relative merits of various fast cars and electronic gadgets. Some people choose to play the game; others don’t. As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” (or woman).
On a lighter note, it seems that both medical and legal television dramas often bear little resemblance to reality, but can be worth watching as a bit of entertaining escapism!
Early in my medical studies it became clear to me that in general those in the medical profession did not understand how the law worked, and as a result tended to be highly traumatized when involuntarily brought into contact with it in a professional capacity. Conversely, it was also clear that the average lawyer did not understand the complexities of medicine. So I lobbied, rather unsuccessfully, for cross-fertilisation between the two professions at the training stage to increase awareness and understanding. We all seem to have an innate understanding of the concept of “natural justice” but legal process itself and the laws of evidence are highly technical and as an experienced lawyer once commented, “the law has nothing to do with justice”. For someone unfamiliar with it, it is a complex, intimidating, somewhat archaic and rather costly system. Once you are in the legal spotlight, it is rather like having a serious illness in that there is a loss of control over what is happening to you and the outcome is determined by external forces.
If you have never studied biomedical science, you may not appreciate the extent to which the human body is a complex piece of machinery; with genetic variation everyone is slightly different and no health outcome can ever be guaranteed. Much of what we do in medicine is rightly evidence-based but there are also many situations where medicine is an art rather than a science. In general, doctors use their best endeavours to uphold the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm” but the outcome of treatment or intervention cannot always be foreseen or predicted. In these circumstances, medicine cannot be reduced to a black and white contract and a different model of dispute resolution is required than for a commercial dispute for instance. However, that said, the power and importance of good communication and adequate and appropriate record-keeping cannot be under-estimated in working within the constraints of our legal system.
In my work in Emergency Medicine this year I have been reminded reasonably often that the world is far from the egalitarian place I imagined as a child where for women it was not a case of whether you could do something but rather of how you would go about achieving it. We are the fortunate few – we speak English fluently, have had a good education and the opportunity to enter an elite profession and can decide for ourselves whether we want a career or family or both. Many women are excluded by economic or cultural imperatives from having such choices and never have the opportunity to explore their full potential. It should not be so, but we hold a privileged position and as much as we can rightly grumble about the challenges we face, we are doing something special in the overall scheme of things and by our achievements and gains making it just a little bit easier for those who follow.
As an experienced professional person starting from the beginning in a new profession, I have been keenly aware of issues such as lack of respect, discrimination and bullying, and I am sad to say that another thing that law and medicine can have in common is a “dog eat dog” mentality. It can be a jungle out there where “survival of the fittest” and “sink or swim” are the rules of the game. I am also a volunteer ski patroller and cross-country ski racer and was recently taken aback at the extent of kindness shown to me by virtual strangers when I experienced serious equipment problems during a race. Reflecting on this later, I realized that over my professional career I was not used to people being kind to me or helping me, which is a rather sad cultural indictment. So in closing I would like to suggest that as we are all fellow travellers on a great journey that we should take the time to be kind to each other and to help and support each other. To paraphrase the poet John Donne, “no human being is an island entire to itself”.
Thank you.
From a gender perspective, there are certainly areas in both law and medicine which remain clearly male-dominated and this throws up real and difficult challenges to overcome. The prevailing cultural benchmarks often have nothing to do with professional skills or aptitude. For instance, as a commercial lawyer you might need to show your prowess at wining and dining clients and knowledgeably discussing the footy and cricket, or when assisting with orthopaedic surgery display your ability to discuss the relative merits of various fast cars and electronic gadgets. Some people choose to play the game; others don’t. As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” (or woman).
On a lighter note, it seems that both medical and legal television dramas often bear little resemblance to reality, but can be worth watching as a bit of entertaining escapism!
Early in my medical studies it became clear to me that in general those in the medical profession did not understand how the law worked, and as a result tended to be highly traumatized when involuntarily brought into contact with it in a professional capacity. Conversely, it was also clear that the average lawyer did not understand the complexities of medicine. So I lobbied, rather unsuccessfully, for cross-fertilisation between the two professions at the training stage to increase awareness and understanding. We all seem to have an innate understanding of the concept of “natural justice” but legal process itself and the laws of evidence are highly technical and as an experienced lawyer once commented, “the law has nothing to do with justice”. For someone unfamiliar with it, it is a complex, intimidating, somewhat archaic and rather costly system. Once you are in the legal spotlight, it is rather like having a serious illness in that there is a loss of control over what is happening to you and the outcome is determined by external forces.
If you have never studied biomedical science, you may not appreciate the extent to which the human body is a complex piece of machinery; with genetic variation everyone is slightly different and no health outcome can ever be guaranteed. Much of what we do in medicine is rightly evidence-based but there are also many situations where medicine is an art rather than a science. In general, doctors use their best endeavours to uphold the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm” but the outcome of treatment or intervention cannot always be foreseen or predicted. In these circumstances, medicine cannot be reduced to a black and white contract and a different model of dispute resolution is required than for a commercial dispute for instance. However, that said, the power and importance of good communication and adequate and appropriate record-keeping cannot be under-estimated in working within the constraints of our legal system.
In my work in Emergency Medicine this year I have been reminded reasonably often that the world is far from the egalitarian place I imagined as a child where for women it was not a case of whether you could do something but rather of how you would go about achieving it. We are the fortunate few – we speak English fluently, have had a good education and the opportunity to enter an elite profession and can decide for ourselves whether we want a career or family or both. Many women are excluded by economic or cultural imperatives from having such choices and never have the opportunity to explore their full potential. It should not be so, but we hold a privileged position and as much as we can rightly grumble about the challenges we face, we are doing something special in the overall scheme of things and by our achievements and gains making it just a little bit easier for those who follow.
As an experienced professional person starting from the beginning in a new profession, I have been keenly aware of issues such as lack of respect, discrimination and bullying, and I am sad to say that another thing that law and medicine can have in common is a “dog eat dog” mentality. It can be a jungle out there where “survival of the fittest” and “sink or swim” are the rules of the game. I am also a volunteer ski patroller and cross-country ski racer and was recently taken aback at the extent of kindness shown to me by virtual strangers when I experienced serious equipment problems during a race. Reflecting on this later, I realized that over my professional career I was not used to people being kind to me or helping me, which is a rather sad cultural indictment. So in closing I would like to suggest that as we are all fellow travellers on a great journey that we should take the time to be kind to each other and to help and support each other. To paraphrase the poet John Donne, “no human being is an island entire to itself”.
Thank you.
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