About this event
Dr Sophie Harrison started at BSMS in 2003, the same year that the medical school opened. We are delighted to welcome her back in the school’s 20th anniversary year to discuss her unconventional career path and what exactly it takes to make a doctor.
Sophie worked as a journalist and editor before she decided to go to medical school in her late twenties. Having previously masked her incompetence at English grammar, she was about to discover an incredible new volume of facts to feel unconfident about. Five years later she had accumulated enough information to fill thirty-eight notebooks and had learnt how to turn on a tap with her elbow. Was she a doctor now, or was there still more to come?
She will discuss how a doctor is made, and what a doctor is. What makes a doctor: a caring-yet-brisk bedside manner? A mode of dress? A stethoscope? What is empathy, and what does it achieve? How do we deal with pain, our own and other people's?
Sophie works as a GP in Cambridge. Her book The Cure for Good Intentions was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week in 2022.
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