The Michigan Family of Medicine
“Will you be good enough?”
Commencement speaker Sanjay Gupta (M.D. 1993, Residency 2000) posed that question to the 161 graduating medical students in the class of 2009 on May 9 in Hill Auditorium. “You will have doubts from time to time,” said Gupta, “and doubts will make you a better doctor. They will remind you to be humbled by the awesome task of saving people’s lives.” Gupta reminded the graduates that they were entering the ranks of the most finely educated doctors in the world.
Arguably one of the most widely known physicians today and a former candidate for U.S. Surgeon General in the Obama administration, Gupta took a break from his duties as chief CNN medical correspondent to return to Michigan to address the medical school’s newest cadre of doctors of medicine. “Remember what drove you here in the first place,” he exhorted them, “and what made you so passionate about medicine. You are about to become the most important person in countless people’s lives.”
In addition to encouraging their personal responsibility to patients, Gupta urged the graduates to work to end disparities in health care access. “Dreams, ambitions and desire to do the right thing by others are evenly distributed throughout the world,” Gupta said, “whereas opportunities, working systems and justice are not.” Calling the withholding of health care and lack of access to quality care the worst type of injustice, Gupta told the graduates that “ending disparities can begin with you.”
In addition to his media work with CNN, Gupta is on the neurosurgery faculty at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta and performs surgery at Emory University Hospital and Grady Memorial Hospital, where he serves as associate chief of neurosurgery.
Prior to the conferring of degrees, Medical School Dean James O. Woolliscroft recounted some of the great contributions Michigan has made to medicine throughout its illustrious history, including the development of the world’s first fiberoptic gastroscope (see “Light at the End of the Fiber” in this issue). In the context of that 159-year tradition of innovation and excellence in education, research and patient care, Woolliscroft warmly said to the graduates, “Welcome to the Michigan family of medicine.”
—RK