Dr. Sophie Hofstader

How many patients have you seen in your career?

Dr. Sophie Hofstader is shaking her head. The dermatologist has been with The Scarborough Hospital for 52 years, longer than any other active physician.

“Thousands and thousands,” she replies in a whisper. “I love what I do.”

Dr. Hofstader and her now retired husband, Dr. Emeric Hofstader, settled in Scarborough shortly after the hospital opened. There was a baby boom at the time and while he worked on his post-graduate studies, she went into family practice.

“I was delivering a lot of babies. We had mothers in beds all over the corridors. That’s back when mothers stayed for five days,” says Dr. Hofstader.

When her husband finished his studies—residents only made $100 a month—Dr. Hofstader began post graduate work.

“Originally I wanted to do neurology,” she said. But after a decade in family practice, it was dermatology cases that puzzled her and today she still loves the challenges of the field. The unusual cases excite her the most as do the challenges of a patient referred by another dermatologist unable to make a diagnosis.

“I don’t think I am any better—most of them I trained. I see the patient at a time when they have more obvious problems and I spend a lot of time with them,” she explains.

Dr. Hofstader has countless interesting stories from her years in practice. There’s the house call to a teenaged patient who delivered her baby in a toilet unbeknownst to her parents. And there’s the recent immigrant who misunderstood the doctor’s request to bring a urine sample and instead brought homemade wine—news the doctor got from the lab.

The doctor also has many touching stories. Thirty years after successfully treating a teenaged boy with severe acne, who had been suicidal, she still receives letters from him.

“I get to know my patients. It’s nice when you hear from them years later,” she says.

The daughter of a doctor, Dr. Hofstader was born in Poland. She lived in the former Soviet Union, Siberia and Georgia before coming to Canada. Hearing regular stories about her father’s work attracted Dr. Hofstader to the field.

“I had two choices: mathematics or medicine. I like people, so I went with medicine,” she says. 

At her husband’s urging, she recently cut back her hours.

“I’m still doing everything, just a little less of it,” she says.

Does she have any plans for retirement?

“No,” she says. “As long as my brain works, I will work. I don’t see it as work. I look at it as fun.”