Overview
Hey everyone!
Welcome to this week’s article where we deep dive into a great book written by Dr Yumiko Kadota, titled ‘Emotional Female’.
Today’s book review will cover the following topics:
Rating
One Line Summary
Where can I buy it?
Book Summary
Writing Style & Design
What I Learnt from this Book?
Who Should Read this Book
Quotes & Excerpts
Meet the Author
Similar Books
Where can you buy it?
Final Thoughts
Rating
One Line Summary
Wow. This book is a must read for every junior doctor.
Where can I buy it?
Book Summary
Emotional Female is a brutally honest account of Dr Yumiko Kadota’s life as an aspiring surgeon, training in the Australian Public Health care system. I am so glad that Dr Kadota had the courage to write down her experiences as a junior doctor and share them with the world. This is an extremely powerful autobiography. The book explores Yumiko’s childhood, growing up in an Asian household with stoic parents. It shares some eye opening experiences she faced as a medical student and then deep dives into her experiences as an unaccredited surgical registrar vying for a position on the Plastic Surgery training program. She discusses bullying in the workplace, harassment and mental illness. Most of all, it explores why being called an ‘Emotional Female’ is certainly not something to be derided or looked down upon.
Writing Style & Design
Emotional Female is so effective because of Yumiko Kadota’s individualistic writing style. Her writing is simple, elegant yet extremely powerful. It gives you a true sense of her experiences working in the cut-throat world of surgery. It’s an easy page turner and doesn’t require immense brain power to read. The style is captivating without being overly technical or high brow. Even if you don’t have a medical background, this book will make perfect sense to you.
I also LOVE the cover of this book. It pays tribute to the Oxford Clinical Handbook series, which every medical student and doctor will have perused at some point in their training. Unlike the Oxford Handbook, it is a much easier and more fulfilling read. It’s such a clever idea that really makes it pop off the bookshelf.
What I Learnt from this Book:
- Being a female in surgery is hard. DAMN HARD.
- Medicine has a long way to go to achieve gender equality in the workplace (especially in male dominated specialties such as surgery).
- Junior doctors have a lot of shared experiences that we don’t often talk about for fear of losing our jobs/not being accepted onto training programs/being perceived in a negative light.
Who Should Read ‘Emotional Female’?
I would recommend this book to literally anyone.
Specific groups that might be interested include:
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Females
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Emotional females
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Males, especially those who call females ’emotional’
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People from a minority background
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Anyone interested in pursuing a career in surgery
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Medical students
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Doctors (junior, senior and everyone in between)
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Non-doctors
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Anyone who really wants to understand the challenges faced by women, minority groups and those vying for roles in medicine that don’t fit the stereotype.
Quotes & Excerpts
After raising issues around rostering, she asked to scrub into a difficult plastic surgery case. She was met with this response from her boss:
‘ Oh no, you go home…we wouldn’t want you to get too tired now, would we?. The sarcasm was piercing.
When she tried explaining to a male ED registrar, why a outpatient clinic referral was not appropriate call to make at 3am in the morning, she was met with this response:
‘ Calm down, you’re being an emotional female’
More than halfway into a gruelling plastic surgery rotation, a scout nurse could see Yumiko was suffering and asked her is she was okay. This was her response:
No…no, I’m not…I’ve been working for twenty-four days in a row, and I don’t think I can keep going.
Meet the Author
Dr Yumiko Kadota is a medical doctor living in Sydney, Australia.
She recently retired from clinical work after experiencing burnout and now works as a University Lecturer. She is passionate advocate for doctors’ health and wellbeing. Prior to publishing ‘Emotional Female’, she first entered mainstream media after writing an article, entitled ‘The Ugly Side of Becoming a Surgeon’ in 2019.
You can also check out her blog or follow her on Instagram or Twitter
Where can you buy it?
Similar Books
Final Thoughts
The purpose of this book is not to entertain or be an enjoyable experience per se. In fact, certain sections can be quite confronting and triggering (especially if you’ve been in similar situations). However, this book is damn good because it accurately reflects the day to day life of a junior doctor/aspiring surgeon. For these reasons it is definitely worth a read. Yumiko, if you are reading this, thank you for writing this book! In sharing your own story, you have given Australian junior doctors (especially unaccredited surgical registrars) a voice.
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PS: Some of the links in this blog post are affiliate links, from which I receive a small kickback
