It has nothing to do with flights of intuition or brilliant diagnoses or even saving lives. It's dealing with a lot of people with chronic diseases that you really can't change or improve. 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. 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. Let not grief overwhelm us, or a sense of loss embitter us. But out of our sadness let there arise a new joy for so much given to us. Cast out our fears and let not our hearts be troubled.