You can help patients. But the actual calling on people, at all times and under all conditions, the coming to grips with the intimate conditions of their lives, when they were being born, when they were dying, watching them die, watching them get well when they were ill, has always absorbed me. To be a doctor, then, means much more than to dispense pills or to patch up or repair torn flesh and shattered minds. To be a doctor is to be an intermediary between man and God. This rush toward what some have termed the 'commercialization' of medicine and others have called the 'industrialization' of medicine has bewildered physicians, perhaps because we have instinctively sensed that although there have always been some business aspects to medical practice, medicine, in the most fundamental sense, is not a business.
Doctors are only people.
They're not saints whose word is the final and absolute end. Doctors who didn't understand they were only human were less likely to admit they made mistakes or that their patients could sometimes be right and they could sometimes be wrong. For physicians who believe in God, prayers have always been a source of comfort. These prayers were selected to help you deal with the times when you are amidst death and sorrow. First appeared in print in 1793.