Making a Good Doctor: Sources of Strength and Wisdom

’Doctors will love this book. It speaks to them in profoundly personal ways, and also in stimulating intellectual ways [and] full of source material to help doctors and educators shape a better world in medicine.’ - Moira Stewart PhD, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, Centre for Studies in Family Medicine, Western University, Canada

We can all find ourselves lost from time to time-- whether we are near the beginning, the middle, or the ends of our professional lives. Doctors are no exception.

’Making a Good Doctor’ addresses core questions which lie at the heart of what is to be a doctor. What is our work for? How do we learn to be good at it? How do we respond to suffering? How do we sustain that-- survive, even flourish? How do we resist those innumerable forces that undermine our fundamental purpose? What is it, the ’right stuff’, of medicine?

In this book, a collaboration of doctors adopts a wide range of style and technique to address areas such as over-diagnosis, error, patient dissatisfaction, inequity, commodification, moral injury and doctor/patient suffering. Chapters consist of academic enquiry and discourse, philosophical and literary exploration, autobiography, reflection, patient narrative, professional conversation and pedagogical dialogue.

The authors range from newly qualified doctors, through highly experienced clinicians, to medical authors of international standing. Coming together in collaboration, we bring to bear a wide range of perspective and tone to examine these critically important topics.

Key Features

- Offers a uniquely holistic combination of personal stories and critical perspectives on current medical education and practice.

- Builds around a person-centred ideal that sets the humanity of both patients and professionals at the centre of both teaching and clinical care.

- Expresses ideas and ideals that have been tested in educational practice and have solid theoretical underpinnings in medical philosophy and psychological and pedagogical research.

This book is essential reading for any medical practitioner or educator interested in understanding more about the forces that shape, and distort, medical culture and healthcare systems. It is directed at those interested in developing insight and learning techniques for collaboration, resistance, resilience and change.

The Editors

Edvin Schei is Professor of General Practice and Head of Medical Professionalism, University of Bergen, Norway.

Iona Heath is a former general practitioner and a past President of the Royal College of General Practitioners, UK.

Peter Dorward is a general practitioner and medical teacher, Edinburgh, UK.

Caroline Engen is a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities, University of Bergen, Norway.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 International license.

Edvin Schei

I was, long ago, a critical medical student who hoped in vain that medicine would teach me about people and make me wiser. Slowly, learning from my patients, I found my way as a family doctor, a teacher of medical students, a researcher in medical education, and an advocate of human connection in medicine. I have been a visiting scholar at Boston University, McGill University in Montreal, and Maastricht University. I have learned that medicine, and patients, profit from philosophy, friendliness, humour and honesty.

Iona Heath

I worked as a general practitioner in a deprived inner-city area of London for almost 35 years. It was an amazing place to work and I learnt almost everything I know from the courage and endurance of my patients and from colleagues from across the world but perhaps especially from Scandinavia. I discovered that the work of general practice has such an astonishing breath that reading almost any book, fiction or non-fiction, has something to teach us about the human condition that is relevant to our work. Reading taught me to write and writing has helped me to think.

Peter Dorward

I am a family physician, and medical teacher, based in Edinburgh, Scotland. I have a long interest in the intersections of medicine, philosophy and literature, and talk and write extensively on this subject. I am the author of ’The Human Kind, A Doctor’s Stories from the Heart of Medicine＂ (Bloomsbury 2018)

Caroline Engen

I trained as a cancer researcher before turning to psychiatry and a scholarly path in the philosophy of medicine. This path continues to shape both my clinical work and academic inquiry, and has taught me to see suffering not only as something to be known and treated, but as something that reveals. My work largely focuses on epistemological and ethical dimensions of contemporary medicine.