Introduction
Hardly a glamorous subject, urinary tract problems in women have become
my life’s work. But how did I arrive at this decision? Unlike Aphrodite, I did
not emerge from the medical school clamshell as a urological surgeon and
author. Some autobiographical background is called for.
I grew up in one of the few major cities in America that still has a
single-sex public high school for girls. Before attending the Philadelphia
High School for Girls, I attended a private all-girls grade school in the
suburbs. I transferred to public school in the ninth grade, where I was one
of 550 girls in my year. Everyone was female, including the president of the
student body, the varsity athletes, the entire marching band, 
the first chair
of the orchestra, the valedictorian, and the editor of the school newspaper.
After graduation, I attended Barnard College, the women’s college of
Columbia University. Although men attend classes in Barnard and the athletic
programs are integrated, Barnard has a distinct place within the University.
I had many female professors and advisors. My female classmates
majored in physics as readily as they did in economics or English. We had
a large number of premedical students with a well-structured mentoring
program of women doctors who had all graduated from Barnard.My desire
to become a doctor did not surprise my friends or family.
The first coeducational institution that I attended was the medical
school of the State University of New York in Brooklyn. Nearly 40 percent
of my class was female, and for the first two years, no perceptible differences
between the education of the male and female students existed. During the
third year, like all American medical students, we spent time in the hospital
learning to evaluate and treat patients. The year is divided into specialties,
such as internal medicine, surgery, and obstetrics and gynecology. At
that time, general surgery tended to be a boys’ club. Long, grueling hours
spent with the same group of eight or ten students, mostly men, created