“I said [to my wife], ‘this is what I would have wanted to do if this was available when I started university.’” I remember thinking about six months into the year that I hadn’t had an original thought in a very long time.” After taking a year off to travel, Brodie came back and switched majors—moving from a degree in math and chemistry to one in Spanish and international development studies. She started thinking about a career in health policy or social work. But, when she graduated in 2001, she still wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. Then, while living in Toronto, Brodie landed a temp job at the Regent Park Community Health Centre, and everything started to click. “It was a health centre in a poorer neighborhood in Toronto,” she explains. “There were a lot of refugees, so they had a lot of interpreters on site. And they were short a Spanish interpreter, so my Spanish degree actually came in very handy.” Eventually, Brodie became a full staff member, working on a stay-in-school program run by the centre. And the more time she spent at Regent Park, the clearer her next career move became. 18
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“There were these really great family doctors there who did interesting work, and a lot of advocacy work,” she remembers. “It was working in medicine, but it was really social justice work.” In 2004, Brodie packed up her life and came back to King’s to finish her abandoned science degree and start medical school. Like Matheson, she sees her liberal arts education as a tool that will help her become a better doctor. “At King’s you learn how to think. And once you’ve figured that out, and learned how to find out about things you don’t know, you can apply that to anything,” she says. “It can be kind of disarming to have to find something out, or come up with a question for yourself. I feel like King’s really did that for me.” And, she says, the philosophical concepts she studied in first year are just as important in medicine. “I’m not going to say that I pull out my J.S. Mill every day, because I don’t,” Brodie laughs. “But the idea of thinking about ‘what is the good’ or the right thing
to do... the training I got in laying things out and thinking about them in those ways, that started at King’s. “I also think the people who make good physicians are the people who understand broader concepts,” she adds. “And people at King’s think broadly.” “The thing always to remember is there’s more to medicine—there’s more to people—than just data,” explains Dr. Dory Abosh (BA, BSc ’94), an oncologist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. “People are similar to ideas, they’re very complex and there’s multiple levels to different things. If you take the time and the patience to look into things there’s often more than meets the eye.” Like Matheson, Abosh says her time at King’s gave her a broader understanding of western culture, which helps her relate to her patients at critical moments. It also taught her some useful practical skills. “One of the biggest things that comes in medicine when you’re reading journal articles, is that you have to be able to sift through crap, so to speak, and sort out