Free Intuition by Allegra Goodman

grinned. “The early bird orders the entrée. You're having the roast breast of Bombay duck with bing cherries.”
    “What if I didn't want duck?”
    “But I knew you would want it,” he said.
    She shook her head at him, but couldn't argue. He knew duck was her favorite.
    “How are things?” He leaned forward in his chair.
    “I know what I want to study,” she said. “I've found the thing I want to do.”
    “Medicine!” he exclaimed.
    “No. No, no. I've just come from Houghton Library. I finally got my visitor's card. I think this is it: this is what I want to do. I want to study Robert Hooke.”
    Sandy's mouth twisted slightly in distaste. “Robert Hooke.”
    “He's neglected,” she said.
    “Wonderful.”
    “He fought with Newton. He's probably the most neglected early modern biologist—”
    “Great.”
    “Despite the fact that he invented the word
cell
and saw the first cells under a compound microscope. And his book,
Micrographia
—have you seen it, Dad?”
    “No.”
    “It's unbelievable. I was sitting there in Houghton with the book and I could not believe this stuff. Look. I've got some photocopies under here.” She rooted in the backpack full of papers and books under her chair. “Look at this one. The eye and head of a great drone fly. And this one, a blue fly.” She thrust an inky illustration in front of her father, the exquisite black engraving of an insect enlarged to monstrous full-page size: its hairs, its folded wings, its hideous face.
    “Not before lunch,” Sandy said.
    “I mean, what do you think it was like to see a fly under a microscope, magnified like this for the first time?” asked Louisa. She wanted to open her father's mind, to make him understand what it was like to see these tiny insects rise up from the pages of Hooke's book like great flying machines, to unfold Hooke's illustrations: the ant in all its armored glory. “Did you know this book was a huge best seller? Do you know how many copies were sold?”
    “No,” said Sandy.
    “Neither do I—but I'm going to find out,” Louisa said. “This is what I'm going to do for my dissertation. This book has everything I love: early instrumentation, natural history, art . . .”
    “But have you been thinking about what we discussed?” Sandy asked.
    “Daddy,” she said. “You may have noticed by now—I don't want to be a doctor.”
    “A couple of hours a day,” he said. “You run over to Central Square. They've got a Stanley Kaplan right there.”
    “But just listen,” Louisa said, “I don't want to take the MCATs. What's the point in paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars to study for them?”
    “I could pay,” her father said sweetly.
    “No.”
    “Taking the test doesn't mean you'll be a physician,” he said. “All it means is you're keeping your options open. You'll get a sense of how you'd do; brush up on skills. Give your brain a little exercise . . .”
    “Great, I'll be the only person taking the MCATs for fun,” Louisa said.
    “You'd ace them.”
    “But-I-don't-want-to-do-it,” she intoned, tapping the table with her spoon.
    He yielded then, holding up his hands. Still, he murmured, “But you should.”
    “Why?” she burst out in exasperation.
    “Because you
can,
” he said. And that was the truth. He thought she should go into medicine because she could, because she had everything necessary. Because she had him. He could take her into the Boston medical community and clear the way before her; he could escort her down the polished white halls, past the gatekeepers and competitors, all the while whispering in her ear—beware of this one, don't go anywhere near that one, smile here, say nothing there, watch your back. Louisa should choose medicine because it was the greatest profession; that went without saying. But his motivation was also simpler than that. He wanted her to become a doctor because it would be easy for her, while it had been hard for him.
    “The cassoulet of lamb,