PrimeTime: The Road to an M.D.

August 2024 · 2 minute read

March 22 -- On her last day of gross anatomy lab at Harvard Medical School in 1987, Jane Liebschutz had a hard time parting with her cadaver.

"I felt very attached to my cadaver. When we took out the brain," she recalls, "it made me think that I was holding what used to be a soul … When we left, I felt as if I was leaving something very important behind and I wouldn't get it back."

When her medical training went from the classroom to the hospital, Liebschutz watched a patient die after six hours of open-heart surgery. She was distraught. While crying uncontrollably, she learned that in the future she'd first have to comfort the patient's family so there would be no time for such a reaction.

Now, as a practicing internist at an inner-city hospital in Boston, Liebschutz has a different perspective. "As I've gone along in my career, I've realized that you can't make everything better. People are sick. People die," says Liebschutz. "You need to just be there with them."

Revelations like these are what took filmmaker Michael Barnes to Harvard Medical School 14 years ago. His mission was to chronicle the lives of seven students, documenting a remarkable metamorphosis as these men and women became part of the medical tribe. His documentary series, Survivor, M.D., begins next week on NOVA.

Hospital Hierarchy

Having finished her undergraduate studies at Yale, Liebschutz was 24 and had a background similar to many of her medically elite peers when she entered Harvard Medical School. The same could not be said for Tom Tarter. With his city college degree and experience as an auto mechanic, bouncer and weightlifter, he often felt like an outcast.

"I was born to be a mechanic. I was born to be a carpenter. I was born to be a janitor," he says. "I was very, very nervous about whether or not I was really going to fit in at Harvard," he says. The first month was the most difficult, "because that was when I collided with genteel society." Tarter, who grew up in a rough neighborhood of the Bronx, N.Y., says "a bull in a china shop is a good analogy." Or, he adds, like "a whore in church."

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