The doctor's role was often clerical, a compassionate handholding against fate's furies. Doctors acted as God's intermediaries, and we judged them accordingly. Faith was a combination of knowing that the doctor was doing the best he could, and recognizing that much of life was not ours to control. Some called it accepting your fate. But fate has become an obsolete word, synonymous with nihilism.
Patients even resist words like terminal.
We look back with nostalgia to the time when we could trust our doctors. But keep in mind we put our faith and souls in their hands, in large part, because we had no choices. Take an unexplained lump or bump. Forget it, I'd tell myself, knowing that leukemia, lymphoma and Hodgkin's disease were uniformly fatal. I worked overtime to develop a personal existential indifference.