A passage in the modern version of the Hippocratic Oath reads, “I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.”
Illustration by Bruce Morser ’76
That sentiment encompasses how Dr. Elisa Burns ’78 approached her 36 years as an OB-GYN and gynecological surgeon in Westchester County, N.Y. It also underscores her advocacy for reproductive rights now, in retirement, as a board member for Planned Parenthood Hudson Peconic, which serves the Hudson Valley and Long Island.
Burns honed her philosophy of respect and understanding during her studies at Colgate, before earning her white coat at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons in 1982. “For me, a liberal arts education with a science major was the right road to being a physician,” Burns says, “to learn not just the science, but to also understand other perspectives.”
However, there was an unfortunate dichotomy: While she enthusiastically learned about different walks of life and appreciated being among students with diverse experiences, times were such that she couldn’t share her own LGBTQ identity. “It just was not spoken about,” she says.
Nor when she started her medical career “was there any mention of a gay world, certainly not in terms of medicine and how you might treat a patient who was not heterosexual,” she says. “It wasn’t until much later in my career that the field started to say, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t make assumptions about everybody who walks into our office. Maybe we should be asking open-ended questions and letting our patients identify themselves.’”
Burns gravitated toward the OB-GYN specialty because it offered a rare combination of surgery and internal medicine. She delivered thousands of babies over the first 25 years of her career, then pivoted to focus on cutting-edge robotic surgery.
“I got to know my patients over their entire lifetimes,” she says. “One of the joys of my practice was delivering the babies of newlywed patients, then later helping them when they were done having children, and then when they went through menopause. As they aged, I aged along with them. And at the end, I delivered babies of the babies I had delivered. That full-circle aspect is very rewarding.”
Since retiring in 2020, Burns has become more active on the board of her local Planned Parenthood. “It’s a continuation of my interest from throughout my life, which is respecting others and others being in control of their own lives,” she explains.
Burns has returned to the Colgate campus several times in recent years to speak at the invitation of the LGBTQ Studies Program. She chronicled her experiences in the medical field as part of the department’s “From Colgate to Career” speaker series, and she met with students.
“I talked about what it means to be a physician or gynecologist and to have to talk about something so intimate, for the patient to make themselves so vulnerable,” Burns says. “It’s important for physicians to have that awareness, to be able to understand that their world is not necessarily the world of their patients.”
Burns also volunteers as chair of the board of Neighbors Link, a nonprofit that connects immigrants to resources throughout Westchester County. With 800 volunteers, Neighbors Link serves more than 10,000 immigrants each year. The cause is deeply personal for Burns: She and her wife adopted a teenage boy from rural Guatemala in 2015.