Sublime

He was beginning to define, in his earliest work, a new kind of competence in which treatment was the provision of an opportunity for the patient, an opportunity to make himself known.

Look at the patient.

The doctor should therefore observe sickness, attending the patient and identifying symptom clusters and their rhythms.

surgery was also regarded as an inferior trade, the work of the hand rather than the head

As scientific knowledge and technology advanced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, what it meant to be a doctor changed. Michel Foucault’s insight about this change is well summarized by psychiatrist and medical historian Abraham Nussbaum: Foucault described the moment when physicians combined dissection with clinical practice as

Most doctors—most humans, really—have unwittingly inherited a colonial worldview that emphasizes individual health, disconnecting illness from its social and historical contexts and obscuring our place in the web of life that makes us who we are.

Rachel Naomi Remen, who once observed,