She makes doctors cry -- and learn
When Katharine Treadway was 15 and away at boarding school, her father died suddenly. But Treadway wasn't left empty-handed. She had his letter -- the one he had written to her months before his death -- and she memorized the line she liked the most.
''The measure of you, Katharine Conrad Kennedy," her father wrote, calling her by the name he had bestowed on her, ''is what you give to life, the kindliness and thoughtfulness with which you give it, and the joy you create in the giving."
Later, starting a career in Boston as a doctor, Treadway wrote down these words to remind her from where she had come and where she wanted to go.
It had been a circuitous route. She was an elementary school teacher in Rose Valley, Pa., for five years before she realized she wanted to go to medical school. Her husband, David, was surprised to learn of his wife's new plan.
But there is no question -- either from her or him -- that Treadway, now an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an internist at Massachusetts General Hospital, made the right decision.
In her tiny office, pagers bleat. A doctor's white coat hangs over a chair. There are piles of papers, and files of patients, and a waiting room that hums. Patients wait outside her door. But among medical school students, Treadway is known most for her teaching -- and specifically for her class, ''Patient-Doctor 2," the class that makes future doctors cry.
She and Dr. Diane Fingold began teaching it in 1992. It was a nuts-and-bolts course intended to teach second-year medical students how to take patient histories and prepare for actually touching patients. But the class has evolved into something else as well, a sort of medical story time in which the tales are real, the lessons powerful, and the goal compassion.
Medical students, Treadway said, can lose that, beaten down by demands, pressure, and exhaustion. Some doctors in training, explained third-year Harvard medical student Joe Wright, ''start to feel like patients are in the way of them going home." What Treadway has tried to do is to remind students why they wanted to become doctors in the first place. And that's where Treadway's narratives begin.
''I have lots of stories," said Treadway, 58, and with reading glasses and platinum hair to prove it. They are stories of families struggling with a loved one's decision to forgo treatment and just wait to die, stories of house calls at the hour of death, and thank-you letters from patient's families. Sometimes, in class, Treadway reads these letters. At other times, she tells her own stories as students sit enraptured.
''That's Kate's special quality," Fingold said. ''Kate will talk to somebody on a personal level about her experiences as a physician and not just say: 'This is the coursework we need to cover.' She feels it's a personal responsibility to share her passion and her commitment with the students. And, by telling these stories, she brings this course to a whole new level."
The idea, Treadway said, isn't just to give students the tools to practice medicine, but also the capacity to be emotionally present and to care -- not just the first time with a patient but the 100th time, too.
''Of course, it feels good to save somebody's life," Treadway said. ''But it's what happens between you and the patient, and you and the families, that is so soul-nurturing."
That's how she believes her father would have seen it. That's why she still remembers the words in that letter. And, lately, the need for such a doctor has taken on special importance for her as her husband, David, 60, has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
It is a trying and uncertain time, Treadway said. But she has taken comfort in the support of friends and also in one particular thing -- the compassion she has found in the doctors she and David wait to see.
Home: Raised, in part, in Evanston, Ill.; now lives in Weston.
Family: Has two sons, ages 27 and 20, and recalls with fondness the days they spent sailing to Newfoundland and Europe on their 33-foot, black sailboat, The Crow. ''When we would leave on the boat, there was no radio, no TV, no video games, no nothing," she said. ''It was books, cards, games, and us."
Education: Graduated from University of Pennsylvania in 1968 with a degree in art history, and University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1978. On meeting her husband in college some 40 years ago: ''You just felt like you were home." They analyzed themselves ''ad nauseam," she said, and continued as he became a psychologist and couple's counselor. But now, David Treadway said, there is no need for such discussion. ''If you stay married long enough," he said, ''you develop a kind of workable rhythm that doesn't take much effort."
As a kid: She enjoyed burying dead animals -- squirrels and such -- only to dig them up later to see what had happened to them. She also liked keeping dead animals in jars. ''My mother finally made me throw them out."
Award-winning: In 2002, Treadway won Harvard Medical School's ''Faculty Prize for Excellence in Teaching" for her work with Dr. Diane Fingold in the classroom.
