Three-year-old aspiring doctor makes waves on TikTok

A three-year-old who’s become a social-media sensation might possibly be the world’s youngest doctor in training. Every night, Janyl and Dr. Marvin Smith’s daughter Summer asks her dad, an orthopedic surgeon, about his work. “So tell me what bones did you fix?” the toddler asks her dad at the dinner table, in a TikTok video that has been seen more than 760,000 times. Her dad explains that the patient had a fractured ankle. During their chat, Summer asks follow-ups: What happened to the ankle? What’s a “stable ankle?” Did the patient break their foot, too? “No, that’s a good question,” her dad replies to the last question. “Just the ankle.” In other videos she’s playing out pretend doctor-patient scenarios either by herself or with her dad. In another video that’s been seen more than six million times, Summer is crying after her mom tells her that her leg hurts. “I don’t know what to do,” she says through tears. “I’m not an orthopedic surgeon and Daddy’s not here.” “If you ask Summer what she wants to be when she grows up, she will tell you that she is going to be an orthopedic surgeon and ‘work with Daddy,’” Janyl told People Magazine. “We realized it when she was two-years-old,” Janyl told People when asked about her daughter’s interest in the medical field. “She would ask her father . . . if he was going to ‘look at the bones’ when he would open his laptop to review imaging.” Janyl says Summer’s very first question was about bones. “When she was two-years-old, I was reading to her about the skeletal system from a children’s book about the human body and she asked, ‘Why are bones hard?’ At that point, I called my husband in to answer her question in a scientifically accurate way,” she told People. “I think her curiosity related to medicine and her father's specialty specifically is inspired by dinner table conversations she has heard her whole life and has now become a part of."

Three-year-old aspiring doctor makes waves on TikTok

Register for free access or login.

Related Topics