Sublime

on the subject, notes that some of the medical students who interviewed her when she worked as a standardized patient “seem to understand that empathy is always perched precariously between gift and invasion.”

To acknowledge this shift, there was a movement a few years ago in which doctors were encouraged to refer to patients as “clients.” This term, which psychotherapists often use, is meant to imply a respectful, collaborative relationship in which the medical professional doesn’t hold disproportionate power. But the term never caught on with physician

If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear. I beg you to see what it is that we must save, and not to let the bigots and misogynists take it away from us again.

She tried to get past this—Come on, Katie, rub a little lotion or you’ll hate yourself later—but she couldn’t make herself pick up the Nivea.

Who is going to find the survivors who have no one? Who is even going to see the survivor who isn’t on the news? Who will find these hurting people and tell them how much they are worth?

I began reading literature again: Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Woolf, Kafka, Montaigne, Frost, Greville, memoirs of cancer patients—anything by anyone who had ever written about mortality.

Still, for all of the transformations wrought by the masterful new engines of medicine and by their multitudinous varieties of fuel, there is one singular ingredient of the art of healing that should not be allowed to vanish. That ingredient, so basic and so changeless, is a relationship; it takes place in the quiet surroundings of the sickroom or

Morantz-Sanchez quotes Professor Henry Hartshorne, delivering the 1872 commencement address at the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania: It is not always the most logical, but often the most discerning physician who succeeds best at the bedside. Medicine is, indeed, a science, but its practice is an art. Those who bring the quick eye, the recept