Sublime

other categories of hateful patients Groves identified are “clingers” and “self-destructive deniers.”

However, the point that I am trying to make here, hopefully with some success, is that there is no such thing as Cartesian duality. It is just a way of compartmentalising thinking about illness. Easy, but wrong. You cannot just separate the mind from the body.

Irvin Yalom, the psychiatrist, wrote that it was “far better that [a patient make progress but] forget what we talked about than the opposite possibility (a more popular choice for patients)—to remember precisely what was talked about but to remain unchanged.”

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

He now believed the desire to live to be more than philosophy, more than psychology, but rather, a primordial principle of physics.

As my colleague Jim predicted, I found my initially rigid standards nearly impossible to meet over time. After all, a doctor is not simply a repository of information but a human being with a personality, a sense of humor, and a point of view.

Dr. James Fries, a professor of medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine.