With her characteristic dry wit, she reflects on the depersonalized nature of the hospital: “in Grand Rounds, they read me like a book. Once I did the teaching, now I am taught.” Despite Professor Bearing’s seemingly compulsive need to repeat her credentials to herself, in the hospital, and in the world of research she admits that “What we have come to think of as me is, in fact, just the specimen jar, just the dust jacket, just the white piece of paper that bears the little black marks.”