The Surgeon Who Recognized Her Hands

In 2019, Dr. Marcus Chen was reviewing applications for a competitive surgical residency at Johns Hopkins. Hundreds of files crossed his desk — transcripts, essays, letters of recommendation. But when he opened the file of a young woman named Priya Dasgupta from a small college in rural Ohio, he paused. He had never met her. Yet he recognized something. Three years earlier, he had watched an anonymous video submission to a medical conference — unsteady footage of a student performing an emergency tracheotomy on a choking stranger at a roadside diner using a ballpoint pen casing.…