DEN third year student Leah Rothchild took second place in the 2023 Hope Babette Tang Humanism in Healthcare Essay Contest with The Unspoken Language of Compassion. Of the more than 500 essays submitted, three winning essays from medical students and three winning essays from nursing students were selected. The winning essays were published in the Academic Medicine and the Journal of Professional Nursing.

Rothchild wrote about an experience in Uganda where she witnessed pain, death, and suffering and where there was significant mistrust at first by the locals who didn’t know who the American nurses were or why they were there.

“The first time that I saw a baby die, I was so overcome with emotion and overwhelmed, and so I stepped outside and just started crying,” said Rothchild. I waited until I got outside to cry because I felt like nobody could see me having this reaction, and one of the mothers opened the door and saw me crying. And that was the first moment that I felt like we had a real connection. In the few words she had, she said ‘Excuse me, miss. my baby.’ There she was concern, and she wanted me to come look at her baby and do an evaluation.

”And so that was the moment that I realized showing humanity, compassion, emotion was a way to connect, and not something that needed to be shoved down and hidden. When they saw that I was a human and not just a health care provider, that was when we started to develop that trust.”

Hear Leah reading her essay on the American Medical podcast;