The Chronicles of Women in White Coats

Book Title: The Chronicles of Women in White Coats

Book Author: Amber Robins and Contributing Authors

Publication Information: Columbia, SC, self-published, 2018, 282 pp., $11.59, paperback (Amazon.com)

Medicine and journaling one’s own lived experience as a female physician is the essence of The Chronicles of Women in White Coats. Twenty women representing a variety of cultures and color share 30 personal stories ranging from childhood to medical school, residency, and current clinical practice. Each story is a quick read, offering opportunities to read it straight through or haphazardly when you have a few free minutes.

This is the second book written by Amber Robins, MD, a board-certified family medicine physician, medical journalist, and health care media personality. Her story (#15) describes what many medical students experience: breezing through high school and college as a smart girl but running into the reality that in medical school you are only one of many smart people, and medical school is tough. At her school, there were few physicians of color, and diseases specific to minorities were frequently not covered. In her story, she relates how in a dermatology class the only pictures they saw were of white people, yet she received little or no education on how to diagnose and treat her future patients of color. One day she discovered The Journal of Minority Medical Students and eventually began writing a column about her experiences as a minority medical student.

One of the most brutally honest stories, by Angela Freehill Brown (#25), describes the day she discovered a small painful breast lump and waiting over a holiday weekend for a mammogram. She vividly describes all her past challenges, finally having a calm, successful, balanced life of family and an orthopedic practice, and then waiting at the edge of the cliff to see if she would lose it all. She followed her instincts to insist on an immediate ultrasound-guided biopsy of the small 1-centimeter cyst instead of watchful waiting. The diagnosis was invasive ductal carcinoma, high grade. In the author biographies at the back of the book, she describes herself as a cancer survivor trying to grow back her hair after chemotherapy.

Current issues including the #MeToo movement (medical students and residents sexually harassed by attending physicians) and physician suicide are also covered in stories in #30 and #27.

One of the funniest stories was “One Night on OBGYN,” where a medical student who wanted absolutely nothing to do with vaginas, fell in love with OB after delivering her first baby. Written from a clerkship perspective, Kendra Segura describes how on shadowing rotations, “the primary objective of the medical student wasn’t to learn; it was to not be in the way. We were like dogs begging for treats, hoping our doctor masters would throw us a bone—a surgical case to observe, the chance to assist with a central line placement, anything to get us the experience and approval we needed so that one day we might be the ones handing out the doggy treats” (pp 122-123). I shared the story with medical students on an OBGYN rotation and they just started laughing, telling me it is “a thing” for the medical students to bark at other medical students if they get the opportunity to participate in a procedure.

Many of the stories have similar themes of overcoming adversity, of being told they aren’t smart enough, skilled enough, motivated enough, and of just not being good enough. Different perspectives on the cultural and economic effects of their childhood or country of origin give the stories originality and an awareness of how strongly many women need to fight to become a physician in the United States. The stories are also honest about trying to find a balance between having a career and having a family, and admitting they worry about the effects of long hours, stress, sleep deprivation, not taking care of their own health needs, and burnout/compassion fatigue on their own children and marriages.

I was disappointed none of the stories included a physician who discussed their experiences as an LGBTQ individual. This is especially important as minorities often feel even more exclusion from their personal and professional communities if they come out about gender and sexual preferences that are not heterosexual.

I am also curious how these 20 women were selected as authors. Were they all friends and colleagues or was there an open call for authors to submit their stories? There is no introduction in the book that explains the process of how the stories were obtained or selected for inclusion. It would have been interesting to explain how this community of women was brought together to share their insights and experiences.