Currently a pathologist at Flagler Hospital in St. Augustine, Florida, Dr. Brian Stewart ’04 (BA in Spanish, Minor in Business Administration) majored in Spanish at UF and, during that time, studied abroad with both the Guanajuato (Mexico) and Santander (Spain) programs offered by our department. Although most of his patients are now represented as a piece of tissue on a glass slide and his daily communication at work is primarily with the patients’ clinicians, Brian wants to refute any assumption that studying Spanish had little impact on his professional life. “On the contrary,” he writes, “I think choosing this area of study was one of the best decisions I made as an undergrad.”
As a first-year medical student at Tulane, in addition to realizing that his Romance-language background spared him much mental strain and effort in learning the language of anatomy, Brian became the de facto translator for a Honduran woman who was a regular patient of the free clinic where he served as a volunteer. “I still remember how relieved she was to have someone speak her native language after so much frustration,” Brian recalls. He also worked with other Tulane medical students in Nicaragua through a group called Bridges to Community. During those trips, the students went house to house, explaining how to help recognize, treat, and prevent some of the most common killers in the developing world: infant diarrhea and mosquito-borne illnesses such as dengue fever. “Being able to communicate directly without a translator made this experience so much more effective and fulfilling for both parties involved,” Brian recalls.
“The expansion of my world given to me via studying Spanish is something I could never put a price on. I would not be me without it.”
After Hurricane Katrina, Tulane medical students were dispersed to other institutions while the school and the city of New Orleans were restored. Brian ended up at the Texas Medical Center in Houston, where he spent 9 months post-Katrina and also switched specialties, from pediatrics to pathology.
During his brief period of pediatrics training, his clinic patients were primarily Spanish-speaking only; then, as a pathology resident, Brian had primary responsibility for performing bone marrow biopsies. Obtaining consent, and explaining and performing an extremely uncomfortable procedure, all while trying to comfort the patient was a task greatly eased by his not needing a translator. A number of Brian’s patients had come from Guanajuato; their faces would light up, despite being in a frightening situation, when they learned that their young doctor had lived there for a summer and that their home held a special place in his heart.
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