Medicine: William Osler

     Miles Seeley comments:
     For many years I shared your near-reverence of doctors. Then I became closely associated with many of them at Menninger and through managed care, and the veils of illusion were peeled away. A great many of the doctors of today do not match up to those, Like Osler, you admire. Too many, in my view, have become narrowly-focused specialists with little concern for the whole patient; and the greed of many of them is quite evident.


     My comment: I agree. Likewise, humanists used to be humanists, interested in people and enjoying the exchange of ideas. Now they are hell-bent on becoming the leading specialist in a narrow field and in beating out the competition.
     Now the same has happened to medicine. The generalist who is interested in the whole patient, indeed the patient, is not viewed as being on the cutting edge of science. At Stanford the financial mess at the hospital resulted in the firing of hundreds of devoted workers. I was shocked that some medicine faculty showed no sympathy for them.

Ronald Hilton - 2/6/00