Identity

Who you are when you are not being a doctor.

Medicine is an identity as much as a job, and it can crowd out everything else. We write about the selves doctors keep alive beside the work: the musician, the parent, the athlete, the one who left and the one who stayed. These are whole-person stories, not escape stories.

Identity outside medicine
The selves doctors keep alive beside the work.
Unusual lives
Doctors whose lives took an uncommon shape.

A white coat hanging on a hook inside a front door, a musical instrument case leaning beneath it.

In identity

A brass name plate on a front door at dusk, the first name in focus and the title blurred.

Essay · Identity outside medicine

The name without the title

Medicine gives you a title before it gives you a career. On the slow work of remaining someone without it.

The Editors3 min read

Portrait of a doctor outdoors in the place where they spend their months away from medicine.

In preparation · Unusual lives

A doctor who works half the year

Six months of locum work, six months of something else entirely. How the arrangement works, and what it asks.

In preparation · Unusual lives

Starting over at forty

A senior doctor on leaving a settled career for a second one, and on what carried over.

In preparation · Identity outside medicine

Should medicine be your whole identity?

One doctor argues that total commitment is what the work deserves. Another argues it is what makes doctors brittle.

Pieces marked “In preparation” are being reported and written. Have an experience we should hear about? Write for us.

Collections

Read this together

Collection No. 03

Uncommon Practice

Doctors whose lives took a shape nobody planned for them.

2 pieces in preparation

Elsewhere in Life

Time and energy
The hours that are yours, and the attention you bring to them.
Relationships
Love, friendship and family, on a schedule that rarely cooperates.
Health
Looking after the body and mind that do the work.
Places
Where doctors travel, live and put down roots.
Taste
What doctors read, wear, use and enjoy.

Across the site

The Handover

A richer life, every Sunday.

One considered letter a week, with the best of the Life desk alongside everything else worth a doctor’s time.