The Mini Exam with Maximal Staying Power

As a third-year resident in the fall of 1973, Susan Folstein made daily rounds of the geriatric ward at Cornell Medical Center’s Westchester Hospital. Husband Marshal Folstein was the ward’s attending psychiatrist. Like the other residents, Susan was supposed to assess the mental state of each patient and identify any cognitive impairment. As Marshal remembers it, she’d report, “Mrs. Jones is doing better today, or she’s doing worse.” And he would always reply, “But how do you know she’s better?”Hopkins’ legendary psychiatrist Paul McHugh, now retired, was then the residency training director at Cornell. “Because Susan was married to Marshal,” McHugh jokes, “she could only put up with this for so long.” One day, exasperated, she finally said, “Why don’t you just write down all of the questions you want me to ask these people?”So that night, Folstein did.Read more at...Johns Hopkins Medicine, Fall 2007.