Atul Gawande is a surgeon and a highly respected writer. He’s a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and I’m putting a wonderful – though painful – article by him for the same magazine.

Curiosity and What Equality Really Means

For doctors as much as anyone else, regarding people as having lives of equal worth means recognizing each as having a common core of humanity.

Photograph by Media For Medical / Getty

The following was delivered as the commencement address at U.C.L.A. Medical School on Friday, June 1st.

I want to start with a story. One night, on my surgery rotation, during my third year of medical school, I followed my chief resident into the trauma bay in the emergency department. We’d been summoned to see a prisoner who’d swallowed half a razor blade and slashed his left wrist with the corner of the crimp on a toothpaste tube. He was about thirty, built like a boxer, with a tattooed neck, hands shackled to the gurney, and gauze around his left wrist showing bright crimson seeping through.

The first thing out of his mouth was a creepy comment about the chief resident, an Asian-American woman. I won’t say what he said. Just know he managed in only a few words to be racist, sexist, and utterly menacing to her. She turned on her heels, handed me the clipboard, and said, “He’s all yours.”

I looked at the two policemen with him to see what they were going to do. I don’t know what I expected. That they’d yell at him? Beat him? But they only looked at me impassively, maybe slightly amused. He was all mine. (Continue here)