In 1906, George Bernard Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma first appeared on the London stage. The play concerns a physician, Sir Colenso Ridgeon, who’s discovered a cure for tuberculosis. Ridgeon’s dilemma is that he has a limited supply of the medication and a small staff to administer it. He can treat only ten patients at a time and so must decide

it’s unnecessary and undesirable to limit our readings to medically related texts (she notes that when reading Ivan Ilyich doctors get bogged down arguing about whether the title character of Tolstoy’s novella had gastric cancer or pancreatic cancer, missing the point entirely); that literature helps dismantle the “hidden curriculum,” the teaching

But instead of doing what most people would do when they think they need therapy, call their insurance company to find out which therapists are covered, ask friends for referrals, see their primary care provider, I did what most doctors would do, which is to say that I asked for help while pretending I didn’t actually need help.

over 50 percent of American medical students now are women and in some fields, such as pediatrics, women now make up at least three-quarters of all trainees.

“Medicine isn’t a trade-off between communication skills and clinical knowledge, but rather a merging of the two,” she wrote. “I still believe that I should take every opportunity to grow my knowledge base, but now I recognize this shouldn’t be at the expense of appreciating the communication skills I’ve already developed.”

“I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends,” says Dr. Rieux. “For the moment I know this; there are sick people and they need curing.”

Still, the moment when Weinberg takes the plunge, when he asks the woman about pastry, is very familiar. It’s a moment every clinician has inhabited and, all too often, pulled back from—a threshold we fear crossing. We imagine ourselves, now, in Weinberg’s place, and recognize a double bind, a new doctor’s dilemma: if we ask about the pastry, we

How even the most blameless patient, the victim of an accident or a random illness in no way related to anything that person did and in no way preventable by them, feels shame. How the ill and injured body is a disfigured body, the object of disgust and self-disgust, of shame.

I now see that everything I have ever felt good about—