Choosing a physician when symptomatic is difficult, for it is the first explicit confrontation with illness.Illness is a process that is made easier when a physician is a compassionate, empathic witness.Source: Wellcome Trust Collection/Public Domain.
With symptoms, including substantial weight loss and severe back pain for months, Kalanithi began to suspect the dreaded diagnosis; when test results confirmed his suspicions, he knew, as a physician, what lay ahead.Source: Copyright 2024 Artists Rights Society , New York/SIAE, Rome. Private Collection Photo Copyright Christie's Images/Bridgeman Images. Used with permission of both ARS and Bridgeman Images.literary critic Anatole Broyard was very different.
A physician, at least for him, should have style and “should be able to imagine the aloneness of the critically ill, a solitude as haunting as a de Chirico painting.” Broyard’s ideal physician understands the concept ofDr. Samuel Pozzi, 19th-century gynecologist, by John Singer Sargent, 1881. Broyard suggested that physicians should have style, but Dr. Pozzi may be exhibiting too much.wrote in one of his essays that by marrying, “You have willfully introduced a witness into your life” .
Such was the experience of historian, author, and Yale professor Timothy Snyder, who poignantly described his excruciating visit to one Connecticut emergency room. “The doctors and nurses could not spend more than a few seconds at a time with me,” and looking down at their computer screens, they rarely made eye contact. Their cell phones rang, causing one physician to startle in the middle of performing a delicate spinal tap on Synder.