...Medicine is a profession based on relationships-the relationship of medical students to their teachers and the relationship between patients and their doctors. One of the major failings of the model of the scientific doctor of the 20th and 21st century has been the failure to accept the vital...

..., knowledge, and getting better at it are also involved. Medicine has special habits of mind that allow clinicians to work with the very sick and dying, and in the process, equanimity and imperturbability are learned. Closeness and relationships with patients-their management, utility, pleasures, and dangers...