Sublime

The prescribed separation between a doctor’s clinical and personal selves is now often called “professionalism.” Recently, this term has been challenged as possibly sexist, racist, and homophobic.

Empathy often takes the form of simply paying attention, making a patient feel seen. My patients seem genuinely pleased and surprised when I remember their grandchildren’s names or the fact that they’ve changed jobs or hiked the Appalachian Trail.

But if I didn’t work in the clinic I feared another kind of erasure: the denial of the doctor I had been for most of my adult life. Where did this feeling come from? Medical school. Part of the curriculum, no less essential than anatomy and physiology, is the teaching that physicians do not turn away from human suffering. Others may avoid the sickl

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

I find the photographs cheering, reminders of my patients not as patients, but as people, of their lives beyond what I recorded in their medical charts.

Because feeling thinner has never had anything to do with weight.

Hope is a central human emotion, misunderstood and often mistaken for optimism, as Jerome Groopman reminds us in The Anatomy of Hope.