Emily E. Volk, MD, MBA, FCAP (ACLPTH ’98), is Vice President of System Pathology and Laboratory Services at UofL Health in Louisville, Kentucky. She recently completed two years as Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of Baptist Health, Floyd, in New Albany, Indiana. She is an associate professor of pathology at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, and the President of the College of American Pathologists.
Q. What led you to a career in medicine?
A. My mom was a nurse and my dad was a physician, and honestly, I didn’t understand how anybody made a living outside of healthcare. Truly, I was practically conceived to go to medical school; crazy as it sounds, my parents met when they were both working at General Hospital in Kansas City after a patient safety event. There was a new medical school coming up at the University of Missouri in Kansas City (UMKC). The folks there were creating a six-year baccalaureate MD program back in the late ’60s. My parents got married around the time that program was being organized. My first memories of any discussions about what I would be when I grew up always revolved around becoming a physician, going to medical school. As a kid, I used to go on hospital rounds with my dad, an obstetrician/gynecologist. When I was in third grade, my dad brought home a placenta for me to take for show-and-tell. (These were the days of more lax hospital rules.). What came with that show-and tell-was a detailed discussion of what exactly a placenta is. This obviously had some other implications around the birds and the bees. So, my Mom did take a few phone calls from other parents that evening.
As it turned out, I did end up attending UMKC school of medicine six-year program after I graduated high school. The combined BS/MD program is designed for very motivated young people who are reasonably sure of what they want to do careerwise. One of the reasons the program was developed was to improve access to physicians, especially in rural Missouri. We had a wonderful pathology professor, Dr. Ed Friedlander. He was such a dynamic teacher that a number of us in my graduating class (1993) entered the field. Without Dr. Friedlander, we might have pursued more classically patient-facing clinical specialties. He made pursing anatomic and clinical pathology seem so appealing, always emphasizing how getting the right diagnosis and accurate laboratory test results was critical to nearly every patient. He showed us that pathologists were clinicians creating the foundation for modern medicine.
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