"Riddle me this..."

My oldest daughter just graduated from college - she starts work next Monday, so we are glad to have her home for a few more days.  We had dinner tonight at the local sports bar, and she was telling me about a riddle that she recently heard on Buzz Feed or Instagram or something like that.  The riddle goes something like this:

A man and his son are driving a car together.  They are on their way home from soccer practice.  On the way home, a drunk driver crosses the centerline and hits them head on. The father's injuries are so severe that he dies at the scene.  The son is also critically injured and is taken emergently to the hospital.  The trauma surgeon is called to the Emergency Department, takes a look at the patient, and says, "I can't operate on this patient.  He is my son."  Who is the surgeon?

As it turns out, this particular riddle has been around for quite some time.  Apparently, at least according to my daughter (who is a relatively trustworthy source), the riddle was first heard in the 1960's.  When most individuals heard this riddle back then, they were stumped.  They could not figure out who the surgeon was in the riddle.  What is the solution?

Give yourself some points if you guessed that the surgeon was the boy's mother.  Certainly, times have changed, but I do think that we still have gender bias in medicine, even now in the year 2017.  A recent study suggested that only about 15% of practicing general surgeons are women! Fortunately, every year there are more and more female surgeons graduating from general surgery residency programs, but female surgeons are certainly still in the minority.  I am encouraged by the trends, but we need to be doing better.  Patients generally like to be cared for by physicians who are "like them" - in regards to gender certainly, but also race and ethnicity.  I am proud to say that there are more female residents graduating from pediatric residency programs (my specialty is pediatrics) than there are males.  However, we are still not doing particularly well from a diversity standpoint, even in pediatrics, when it comes to race/ethnicity.  We have work to do!

Interestingly enough, when my daughter told me the riddle, I did consider the possibility that the surgeon could still be the boy's father - give yourself some points if you considered this point too!  When we think about diversity, we usually focus on gender, race, and ethnicity, but we should also consider sexual orientation.  Diversity is not just about race and gender.  As Maya Angelou said, "It is time for parents to teach young children early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength."  George Bush (the first President Bush) famously said, "We are a nation of communities...a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky."  How wonderful would it be if Bush's "thousand points of light" referred to medicine (even more so if it referred to society as a whole)?  We have work to do.