Sublime

When I first went into practice as a primary care doctor I saw my role as paternalistic—an odd stance for a young woman, in retrospect. I took pleasure in knowing that the Latin root of doctor is docere—to teach—and assumed that if a patient didn’t do what I thought they should do either they were recalcitrant or I hadn’t communicated my instructio

In recent years, Shaw’s turn-of-the-twentieth-century drama about the ethics and economics of healthcare has been seen as prescient, prefiguring the establishment of the National Health Service in Britain and the Affordable Care Act in the United States. Even with these developments, modern Colenso Ridgeons still grapple with limited resources, ine

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 whos

I still find it hard to reconcile my deep belief in the healing power of the relationship between a doctor and a patient with the reality that we doctors are easily replaced.