When I first went into practice, I had rather firm notions of the proper boundaries between doctors and patients. I wore a starched white coat and revealed little about my personal life. I never called patients by their first names and felt insulted if they called me by mine. An older colleague found my rigidity amusing. He worked in shirtsleeves a

The experience of the body is never only about the body.

She didn’t fear death—in my experience few old people do. But she wished she could stay around long enough to know “how the story ends,” as she put it: how her grandchildren and great grandchildren turned out; when America would finally elect a woman president, if her garden would ever be as lush as she’d always hoped it would be. But the story nev

Empathy may be as simple as remembering to say the right thing or, as the medical student I observed in “Giving Bad News” failed to do, remembering not to say the wrong one.

seem irrational and unfair, but, in the largest sense, it’s true. And if you have medical training and you don’t prevent someone you love from becoming ill and dying, you feel an even greater sense of failure.

A 2020 study published in the Journal of Vascular Surgery noted a high percentage of young physicians exhibiting “unprofessional behavior” on their personal social-media accounts. “Unprofessional behavior” included drinking alcoholic beverages, expressing political and religious convictions, participating in social activism, and wearing bikinis. Th

Maybe we resent our patients’ list-making because we feel they’re usurping our role, trespassing on our territory.

In the past few decades, many patients and physicians have come to the conclusion that evidence-based treatments by specialists (and sub- and sub-subspecialists) don’t necessarily supply what people need to heal. Physicians and nurses now routinely team up with mental-health professionals, alternative practitioners, social workers, and chaplains to

She, too, took pleasure in words but it was a different pleasure than my father’s. Hers was the storyteller’s pleasure: not in the words themselves but in wrapping up life in them and presenting it, brightened and enhanced, to someone else.