Clara Koo, left, and Sayeeda Chowdhury, were two of the 140 students starting their medical journey with new white coats and stethoscopes.
Each year the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai holds a joyous and celebratory event, giving white coats to its newest class of students before a gathering of faculty, family, and friends. But this year, the 19th annual ceremony for the Class of 2020 took on added resonance. It marked the return of Dennis S. Charney, MD, who was injured in a shooting in August while leaving his favorite coffee shop in Chappaqua, N.Y.
“This ceremony is the first time I’ve returned since the attack,” said Dr. Charney, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean, Icahn School of Medicine at
At the ceremony, Dennis S. Charney, MD, spoke candidly about his injury and about the trials and rewards of being a doctor.
To see his speech, go to: icahn.mssm.edu/whitecoat2016.
Mount Sinai, and President for Academic Affairs, Mount Sinai Health System, who was greeted with a standing ovation in Stern Auditorium on Thursday, September 15. He thanked the police officers who assisted him and the Mount Sinai team who cared for him, including doctors, nurses, security staff, and housekeepers, and said, “During this time, I’ve reflected on concerns both great and small, the bonds we form, the choices we make, the paths we choose. Today we gather to contemplate the role that these 140 men and women will, from this day forth, be asked to play in society: the doctor. Students, I look out at your faces and cannot help wondering, what winds blew you down this path, to this place, to this room, to this moment? What does being a doctor mean in your imagination? Let me be the first to tell you, in the words of the immortal Bruce Springsteen—everybody knows I have to have a Springsteen quote—to be a doctor will require you to be ‘tougher than the rest.’”
At the ceremonial start of their medical education, Dr. Charney assured the students that as doctors they would face many difficult moments. “Being a doctor means coping with loss and disappointment on a daily basis. Many of your patients will not get better. Some will die. Too few will be cured. Sometimes we lose one of our own. Yes, being a doctor is tough. Yet let me also be among the first to tell you it can be incredibly rewarding. In fact, the same elements that make it difficult are often what make it worthwhile.”
Jewel Mullen, MD, MPH, MPA, a top federal health official, gave a keynote speech looking back at her years as a student at the Icahn School of Medicine.
Students were also given a sense of perspective by the event’s keynote speaker, Jewel Mullen, MD, MPH, MPA, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Mullen has spent 39 years as a physician and epidemiologist in a career that has spanned clinical, research, teaching, and administrative roles, including Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Public Health. But she said her core values as a doctor were forged early on, when she was a student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
In those years, she looked out for a neighbor and classmate with type 1 diabetes who had asked for her help. Dr. Mullen said, “He told me his parents needed someone to call in case he didn’t answer their morning call. He explained what might happen in the case of hypoglycemia; he told me when to give him orange juice with sugar, when to use glucagon, when to call 911.”
She said that she was humbled by the trust her classmate placed in her and that she got a sense of what it meant to be a doctor “even before I saw my first patient, even before I got my first white coat. I believe that our professional calling is one that makes empathy a permanent part of us, no matter what we do as doctors. I believe that caring, authenticity, and empathy should remain at the core of what we do as doctors.”
The Class of 2020 expressed such values “beautifully” in the code they wrote jointly and recited together at the ceremony, Dr. Mullen said. In
The Class of 2020 recited their Student Oath, which they wrote collaboratively.
the oath, students pledged “to promote a culture of wellness and mindfulness for ourselves, our peers, and the communities we serve; to be humble agents of change in the pursuit of equitable care; to actively challenge discrimination at large and bias within ourselves; and to reflect upon our own limitations, and those of the medical tradition, using them as catalysts for learning and progress.”
Dr. Charney told students that in accepting their new white coats and stethoscopes they were not being inducted into an “elite community of doctors, but instead into a community of everyday people who vow to live by a code of honor.”
“Finally,” he said, “I know bad stuff does happen. A bad thing happened to me. You will face tough times, but if you stay the course, nose to the grindstone, eyes to the stars, ultimately you will emerge further down the road tougher than the rest.”