Regret the Error

A front-page article on March 19 about why many medical students find lucrative specialty fields like dermatology more attractive than general medicine paraphrased comments by several people but put the paraphrases between quotation marks, a violation of The Times’s rule that every word between quotation marks be what a speaker or a writer actually said.
In particular, a quotation attributed to Thomas Hocker, a medical student, was an imprecise paraphrase of what he had said, according to the reporter’s handwritten notes.
After noting the importance of preventive medical care despite the often “humdrum” nature of the conditions treated, he said that “these things that are so important don’t compensate well enough,” and cited “lack of respect for what they do” in a field “viewed as easy because anyone can get into it” as a reason doctors might hesitate to go into internal medicine. He had earlier said that in specialized fields like his own, dermatology, “you know you are valued and your input is valued in the hospital.” He did not say: “But there is not a lot of respect for doctors who do that because anyone can get into it. But if you are an expert where no one else is, like the eye or the skin, your input is valued.” Link