Anna Pou and Frederick Pou's Father-Daughter Relationship

Anna Pou and Frederick Pou's Father-Daughter Relationship was shaped by both distance and example: Frederick’s long hours often kept him away from home, but weekend house calls brought Anna along and showed her what his work required. His influence surfaced again when she left pre-med for laboratory work, a choice he thought would not satisfy her, and later returned to medical school.

A Doctor in a Large Family

Frederick Pou was a Dominican Republic-born, New Orleans-raised internist who worked tirelessly to provide for his family. His wife, Jeanette, the daughter of Sicilian immigrants, gave birth to eleven children; Anna was the seventh. Frederick saw patients in a corner house in the working-class Bywater neighborhood, sometimes scheduling appointments until ten at night and returning home for dinner after midnight. His professional commitment was visible, but it also meant he was often absent from the family’s home on Fontainebleau Drive.

The children helped raise one another, and Anna’s older siblings doted on her when she was little. To give the children time with their father, Jeanette sent Anna and her siblings with him on alternating weekends when he made house calls. Those visits offered more than family time: Anna observed a doctor at work and learned early what the job involved.

A Detour from Medicine

At Louisiana State University, Anna began as a pre-med student, then changed direction against her father’s advice. She became a medical technologist in a hospital laboratory, running tests for infections rather than treating patients as a physician. The shift disappointed Frederick, who believed she would not be content in that role.

A few years later, Anna’s response to an emergency at a party gave her a renewed sense of her aptitude for medicine. When a young man needed help after a swimming challenge, she took charge, gave him breaths, and revived him. Friends remarked on how quickly she had assumed control. Anna later recognized that her father had been right about her dissatisfaction with laboratory work. At thirty, she applied to and entered medical school at Louisiana State University, where Frederick and her uncle had also trained.

An Inheritance of Care

The relationship is conveyed less through declarations than through a pattern of work and return. Frederick’s example made medical care familiar to Anna from childhood, while the hours and sacrifices behind his practice showed that the profession demanded sustained commitment. Her later decision to pursue medicine did not simply follow his path: she first chose another occupation, experienced its limits, and came back to the vocation he had anticipated for her.

The book’s account also places Frederick’s influence within a wider family practice of caring for others. Anna grew up among siblings who helped raise one another, and she herself later took responsibility for helping with younger children. Her route into medicine thus connected her father’s professional example with the everyday caregiving she had learned at home.