The moment Michael walked in the door, the counselor bristled. “You check all the boxes, and your grades are good,” Michael remembered him saying. “But you’re going to have a hard time.”

Michael asked what he meant by that.

“Look,” the counselor said, walking over to a paper thermometer taped to his wall. The temperature reading was supposed to represent the percentage of med-school applicants who had gained admittance to their top-choice school. The counselor pointed to the 95-degree mark.

“That’s my average,” he said. “You’re gonna be bad for my average.”

“I don’t give a shit,” Michael said, using what would become a go-to phrase for him in situations like these.

The counselor thought for a minute. “Well, in that case I guess you have two options,” Michael recalled. “Either tell them about it ahead of time, or…just go to the interview and see what they say.”

The “it” the counselor was referring to was that Michael, an adult man, was just 4 feet, 3 inches tall. If he stood toe-to-toe with an average nine-year-old, their eyes would meet. That’s a standard height for someone with his condition: achondroplasia, or dwarfism.

Michael’s interest in medicine took root during his regular childhood trips to various medical specialists, who worked on his painful joints and ligaments. He admired how some doctors treated Little People with respect, giving them a little more time to take their pants off, for example, but not doing it for them. He imagined how great it would feel for a kid with dwarfism to have a doctor who knows exactly what it’s like.

Michael excelled in school, and even sports, but when he was preparing to graduate from college, society had not yet progressed sufficiently to allow Little People to be considered capable doctors. At the time, people like him were still derisively called “midgets.” Still, after the counselor’s appointment, Michael decided he wasn’t going to back down. He figured he’d just leave his height off his application. He applied to thirty medical schools in all.

Being short has, for centuries, been associated with not just physical but mental frailty. Little People have long been laughed at and exploited, enlisted as court jesters or circus performers. A medical textbook from 1959 speculated that many dwarfs are “backward for their age,” adding, “Because of their deformed bodies they…are emotionally immature and are often vain, boastful, excitable, fond of drink and sometimes lascivious.”2 Even today, bias against people of short stature is one of the last acceptable prejudices in the world. Short men are still joked about and discriminated against in the labor market.

When Michael arrived for his med-school interviews, he was looked down upon in more ways than one. Some admissions officers would go through the motions. Others stared awkwardly, then dismissed him from the meeting. “Patients won’t respect you,” one said. “They want tall doctors with long, white coats.” He was rejected from every single school.