Addressing Doctors
Engineering professors feel little need to wear their titles on their sleeves.
By Henry Petroski
The road on which I live, being not very long, contains only a dozen or so houses. When one of them sold recently, everyone on the road looked forward to meeting the new neighbors at a get-together at the home of the most gregarious among us. Each neighbor brought a bottle of wine or a tray of hors d’oeuvres to the informal gathering.
Introductions were made and memories refreshed about what everyone did for a living or had been doing since last seeing each other. Since ours is a university town, it is not surprising that over half of the households on this single street have connections of one kind or another with the university and its various professional schools. Such an institution is naturally full of doctors—Ph.D.’s, Sc.D.’s, M.D.’s, J.D.’s, D.D.’s, et al.
This was brought home indirectly by the updated neighborhood directory that the hostess—an obstetrician’s wife—had prepared and distributed to the party guests. Not only did the list of residents contain familiar names from campus but also it emphasized that a number of them were M.D.’s. It did this through such listings as “Smith, Jane and Dr. John.” The family of two physicians from across the street was listed as “Jones, Dr. Sarah and Dr. Mark.”
Medical doctors, who often have the prefix “Dr.” sewn into the white lab coat they wear at work, do not necessarily leave the title aside on social occasions. At the get-together, a younger doctor addressed an elder colleague as “Dr. Steve,” and a conversation with non-doctors was punctuated with references to “Dr. Susan,” who was standing only feet away.
Among the other neighbors listed in the directory but not identified as such were a Ph.D., a professor, a retired judge, an architect, and an engineer, but none of these professionals had his or her name prefixed with an honorific. In America, at least, it is the M.D. that seems to command disproportionate respect. I have even seen medical doctors listed redundantly as “Dr. Peter Swift, M.D.,” perhaps in case the first mention of his educational credential was missed.
There have been attempts to distinguish the names of other professionals: Lawyers appending “Esq.,” judges using “Hon.,” architects identifying their affiliation with the AIA, and engineers being identified with the prefix “Egr.” However, Ph.D. professors risk being confused with M.D.’s when introduced as “Dr. Chips.”
Perhaps because of the seeming inseparable nature of a medical doctor’s name and title, and a sensitivity to offending some equally distinguished colleagues, it seems to have become common practice for those in the medical center at my university to refer to their professor patients as “Dr.” There is seldom any chance of confusion about who is who in the hospitals and clinics, however, since the “real doctors” are almost always wearing their embroidered white lab coats.
While there was a time when engineers wore their slide rules as ostentatiously as medical doctors still do their stethoscopes, it is difficult today to tell an engineer from a non-medical scientist, say, just by the way he or she dresses. And American engineers, at least, certainly tend to be less self-conscious about titles than their medical-doctor neighbors, on campus and off. Younger engineering professors, especially, may even encourage their students to call them by their first names, in class and out.
Most engineers, in my experience, wonder as Shakespeare almost did, “What’s in a title?” Doctor, dentist, engineer, or chef—these are designations for what a person does, not for how well he or she does it. And professors of engineering, at least, know it matters less how they are dressed and addressed than how well they know their material and explain it to their students.
Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke. His latest book is The House with Sixteen Handmade Doors: A Tale of Architectural Choice and Craftsmanship.
Photo by Catherine Petroski