The Surgeon's Daughter Learns to Read the Chart

When Maria Chen was eight years old, she used to sit in her father's office at Johns Hopkins and flip through his medical textbooks. The pages were full of words she couldn't pronounce and diagrams that looked like abstract art. Her father, Dr. David Chen, would smile and say, "Someday, sweetheart. Someday these will make sense." Twenty years later, Maria stood in that same hospital as a third-year surgical resident.…