Who deserves to have a baby?

Years ago, I interviewed for a residency position at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Standing before the domed Victorian building at the campus entrance, I couldn’t help but be in awe of the history of the place, the great doctors who had once walked the halls and the scientific discoveries they had made in those very rooms.  

Medicine is a profession that loves eponyms—every gynecologic surgeon, for example, is familiar with the Sims retractor, Sampson’s artery, and Meigs syndrome. Once residency training begins however, there is little time to dwell on the people behind the names, let alone the context in which their discoveries took place. 

I ended up doing my residency at a different hospital in Boston. But for much of that time, I carried a ghost from Baltimore with me. 

Richard Wesley Te Linde was the first Chair of Gynecology at Hopkins—and the first Chair of Gynecology anywhere. He published Te Linde’s Operative Gynecology, in 1946, a hefty textbook that still remains a mainstay for ob/gyn residents nearly 80 years later. Most nights I would pore...