Dr. Rosalind Kaplan is the kind of physician we would all wish to have for ourselves. In her new book Still Healing she tells us from the start “I love the art and science of medicine, and I always have. There is nothing better than the part of medicine that I call ‘doctoring,’ the actual care of the patient” (p. 1). Thus, it is disturbing to see how a caring and dedicated doctor who has started off with the best intentions encounters a health care system that is really a health care industry. Kaplan asks “what happens when the practice of medicine becomes more misery than magic for doctors? How can doctors heal patients when they themselves are wounded by the system? What happens to those doctors, and what happens to patients?” (p.3). In this collection of essays the author responds to these questions as she discovers new ways to heal patients, and, in the process, how to heal herself.
Kaplan shares nostalgic memories about a time when she still had the luxury of not having to worry about a patient’s insurance coverage. In an essay about anatomy lab in medical school she conjures up the surrealistic experience of being forced into intimacy with three strangers around a cadaver: “The four of us don’t know each other well. By the end of the semester, we will…We won’t ask the ordinary questions of each other that people do on the way to friendship, like where we grew up and what we like to eat” (p. 9) Since Dr. Kaplan and I were in the same medical school class this proved especially poignant for this reviewer to read.
Kaplan’s recollection of being proposed to by her husband while working a shift in the hospital is charming and hilarious:” ‘Look, you better talk fast,’ I told him. ‘One patient is bleeding out, and another might need a balloon pump.’ I thought for a split second about how absurd my situation was. I was standing in a closet with my boyfriend while people were dying just outside the door…Ask me to marry you.’ ‘Larry, this isn’t funny. I have to go. Mr. B is exsanguinating.’” (p.37).
Even in the halcyon days of her training Kaplan encounters obstacles. At an interview for one of her top medical school choices, she is criticized about her views on abortion. She leaves discouraged and ends up going to another program.
Later, during Kaplan’s residency, she is traumatized when a male resident makes lewd, vicious comments to her. Her humiliation is compounded by being dismissed by her male supervisors: “What did you do to get him so angry?” (p.58), and “it’s your word against his” (p. 60). It is clear “the Old Boys Network still has its hold over medicine” (p. 68).
Yet there are also women doctors who might have been role models for Kaplan and were not. In an essay entitled “Detach,” she asks if one has “to detach in order to care for sick patients? …What doesn’t make sense to me is to push feelings aside permanently, to sweep them away as though they don’t exist” (p. 191). She tells of an oncologist, “a middle-aged woman with long, frizzy hair dyed pitch-black and frighteningly pale skin, [who] reminded me of Morticia Addams” (p.188). She calls “Morticia” for guidance but never hears back, and the patient rapidly goes downhill. When she cannot hide how she feels, she is given negative feedback: “you have to detach” (p.190).
After residency, Kaplan contentedly treats patients in an old-fashioned, low-tech private practice for years, but eventually that becomes impossible: “We tried, but ultimately closed our doors…when we became aware we would soon have to choose between paying our staff, paying ourselves, and maintaining our computer hardware and software” (p. 141). She goes to work for a health system where the time she used to spend caring for patients is now taken up by writing electronic notes and getting authorizations. After years of selfless sacrifices for patients, she is shamed at being informed she must take “remedial compliance training” (p. 148). If this doesn’t work, she will be considered an “error prone provider.”
Demoralized, Kaplan resigns from her position. Once she is no longer under the yoke of her job, Kaplan gains perspective and undergoes her personal healing process. She enters a program to get a Master of Fine Arts in writing, which she uses to teach in the humanities program at a medical school to help students “process the joys, sorrows, fears, and frustrations of medical training and practice” (p. 162), noting that “I still have something to give, and now I am getting nourished in return. Writing, my patients, and my students are healing me” (P. 164). She goes on to volunteer at a free clinic, a kind of utopia where she can give patients her undivided attention without limits on resources. Finally, in an act of poetic justice, she trains as a physician coach to become the kind of “confidante for other doctors” (p. 241) who have gone through burnout.
In brief, this is a lovely book filled with insights gained from a long career.
Still Healing
Rosalind Kaplan, MD
Minerva Rising Press, 2025, 253 pages
https://minervarising.com/product/still-healing-by-rosalind-kaplan
Web photo by Cezar Sampaio
