Sarah E. Stumbar, MD, MPH
“Do you live with your husband, too?” the second-year medical student asked, innocently enough. It was our first visit with this patient, a healthy middle-aged African American woman. We were just chatting, trying to get to know her, and I had picked up on little clues in our conversation that had already led me to conclude that there was no husband in the picture. The medical student, though, didn’t seem to have picked up on this and, I thought, was trying to get at her sexual history by asking, instead, about her husband.
A few seconds of an awkward, heavy silence followed his question, until the patient forcefully said, “I’m an independent woman.” There was no room left open in her tone for further discussion, and our conversation quickly moved onto other topics.
Later, after the visit, I challenged the medical student to go back to that question and think of all of its assumptions: a heterosexual relationship, the need for a husband to have a child, the assumption that asking about a husband equated to asking a sexual history. I could see the student processing all of this, as he squinted his eyes and stated, “I come from a very conservative family.”
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