Every day doctors have to deal with people who are worn out and unable to stand up to the life they lead. They generally assert that it is impossible to alter the way they live, and sincerely believe that their overwork is the product of circumstance, whereas it is bound up with their own intimate problems. It is ambition, fear of the future, love of money, jealousy, or social injustice that makes men strive and overwork, invent all sorts of unnecessary tasks, keep late hours, take too little sleep, take insufficient holidays, or use their holidays badly. Their minds are overtense, so that at night they cannot sleep and by day they doubly fatigue themselves at their work. M.D. Some patients, though conscious that their condition is perilous, recover their health simply through their contentment with the goodness of the physician.
Doctors like to see healing as the result of their work.
Yet today we often must be content with far less. There are so many things wrong with people's lives that even our best is only a stopgap. The twenty thousand biomedical journals now published are increasing by six to seven per cent a year. To review ten journals in internal medicine, a physician must read about two hundred articles and seventy editorials a month. Such is the price it has paid for its scientific progress.