Proust questionnaire: Beth Watt, MD

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 54, No. 7, September 2012, Page 370 Proust for Physicians
By: Beth Watt, MD

Dr Watt is a GP in Fort Langley.

proust portrait of Dr. Watt

What profession might you have pursued, if not for medicine?
CBC Radio journalist.

Which talent would you most like to have?
Fluency in two other languages (e.g., French and Spanish).

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Raising two individual, independent sons with my husband, Peter.

Who are your heroes?
Julia Child, Oscar Peterson, and Stephen Lewis.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Baking bread and cakes—with teenagers to gobble them up—after a night on call delivering babies.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Fighting the clock.

What characteristic do your favorite patients share?
Hope and courage.

Which living physician do you most admire?
Dr Atul Gawande—he is a big thinker.

What is your favorite activity?
Planning and traveling to explore food cultures (e.g., Vietnam, Borneo, Kuala Lumpur, Mexico City, Puebla, and New York City). 

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
At the end of the office day, “There it is,” and, when talking to students, “You will get tangled up.”

What technical advance do you most anticipate?
Blood serotonin levels.

What is your most marked characteristic?
Cautious optimism.

What do you most value in your colleagues?
Sense of humor and strength of character.

Who are your favorite writers?
Dorie Greenspan, Alice Waters, and Richard Sax.

What is your greatest regret?
Not planting grapes on the Naramata Bench 20 years ago.

How would you like to die?
Skiing on Burnt Stew Basin (a ski run on Whistler Mountain) on a “bluebird” day.

What is your motto?
Same as Wallace and Gromit: “Hang in there, everything’s under control.”

Beth Watt, MD. Proust questionnaire: Beth Watt, MD. BCMJ, Vol. 54, No. 7, September, 2012, Page(s) 370 - Proust for Physicians.


Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

An alternate version of ICMJE style is to additionally list the month an issue number, but since most journals use continuous pagination, the shorter form provides sufficient information to locate the reference. The NLM now lists all authors.

BCMJ standard citation style is a slight modification of the ICMJE/NLM style, as follows:

  • Only the first three authors are listed, followed by "et al."
  • There is no period after the journal name.
  • Page numbers are not abbreviated.


For more information on the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, visit www.icmje.org

BCMJ Guidelines for Authors

Leave a Reply