MOST DOCTORS IN TRAINING don’t begin a new semester expecting to learn about birds. But after her first year studying at Harvard Medical School, Lynn Hur was hooked. “It’s become one of my favorite activities,” she says.
Hur came to the hobby courtesy of associate professor Rose H. Goldman, who incorporates bird identification into her Practice of Medicine class to help sharpen students’ clinical diagnostic skills. In lecture, for example, Goldman asks students to differentiate between a Great Egret and Snowy Egret by homing in on details such as size, beak shape, and foot color that distinguish the slender, white birds. Until classes went virtual during the pandemic,
