For some aspiring physicians, the path to medicine begins with an inspiring mentor. A challenging science class. Maybe a youthful curiosity.

For Shari Barkin, M.D., it started by falling down stairs.

She grew up – the youngest of four and the daughter of a physician and a nurse – in a home “steeped in medicine around the dining room table.” But she had a different future in mind.

As a freshman at Duke University and a talented dancer, Barkin had choreographed a major production that earned her an invitation to New York City for a prestigious performing arts camp working with Broadway professionals. It was there that she fell and, not long after, woke up in the middle of the night, unable to walk. Weeks of hospitalization and months of recovery followed. The experience, she says, helped her recognize “you can’t depend on one part of your body for your career.”

It also exposed her to the best – and worst – of medicine. To the physicians and medical students who crowded into her hospital room, “I was a specimen,” she says. They spoke about her, not to her. They examined her without asking permission. When she demanded they acknowledge her, she was labeled “a difficult patient.”

Yet she also remembers a nurse who attended her late at night. “He would pay attention to the little things,” Barkin says, like making sure she had cold water at her bedside.

Now chair of the Department of Pediatrics and physician-in-chief for Children’s Hospital of Richmond at VCU, Barkin learned important lessons in patient care from those impersonal physicians.

“I will not talk about somebody, I will talk to somebody,” she says. “I will not engage unless I have permission to engage. I will see the person in front of me, not the symptom.” And from her favorite nurse she learned, of equal importance, that “no act is too small if it can help improve somebody’s quality of life.”

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