MAKING THE CUT

A retired eye surgeon looks back on her remarkable life and career.

MacKay, who was born in 1942, begins her autobiography with an extensive overview of her girlhood and young adulthood in the ’40s and early ’50s, when there were scarcely any examples of people living the life she’d go on to lead: “The only female doctor I knew was my aunt, who had a part-time psychiatry practice.” She graduated from Harvard University in 1964, married her attorney husband Malcolm, had two children, and eventually entered medical school in 1973. She went on to become resident and to specialize in eye care—specifically, retinal surgery—and she includes plenty of reflections on the profession: “Good surgeons never rush. They have no sense of urgency,” she notes. “They keep up a steady, leisurely pace. They appear to be doing very little.” This part of her recollection also features accounts of frequent clashes with the institutional sexism of the medical world; in one such incident, an anesthesiologist loudly and condescendingly asked her, “How soon are you going to be finished?”—a question, she rightly notes, that would never have been asked of a male surgeon. The strongest element in her book’s final section is her account of her 30-year fight against the popular laser-assisted eye surgery called LASIK, which makes for the most passionate reading in an otherwise genial book. She writes that complications resulting from this type of surgery are “multiple, disastrous, untreatable, and permanent,” including lifelong pain, disability, and even blindness. The main weakness of the book, though, is the lack of balance between the personal and professional. She writes energetically and engagingly about both parts of her life, but the minute details of the author’s childhood (such as the fact that her grandmother served stewed prunes) are nowhere near as interesting as her experiences as a woman forging a career in a male-dominated profession or her critiques of the most popular form of eye surgery. Whether she’s discussing her time as a medical resident, as a surgeon, or as a professor at Columbia University, her working life is unfailingly compelling.

An engaging, if slightly uneven, doctor’s memoir.