“We are all, to varying degrees, fascinated by the practice of medicine because of its curious combination of dispassionate abstraction and extreme human emotion. Few other professions demand of its practitioners the objective application of science at the point where the human condition is presented at its most vulnerable, those terrifying moments when the body that we took for granted is suddenly revealed to be a precarious scaffold of skin and bone. In those moments, we expect our doctors and surgeons to be reassuringly omniscient and simultaneously caring, to be able to empathise while maintaining the necessary distance of rationality. We want them to possess the power of the divine while remaining consolingly human.
