There’s a famous British painting of a country doctor sitting in a cottage holding a sick child’s hand during a house call, which was common in those days. He’s in intense thought. All these years later we still have those cultural expectations of physicians. But we fall far short in the age of modern medicine. Doctors know it. Patients know it. And so do employers and their advisers.
The irony of that painting is there was far less that we could do for patients before the arrival of antibiotics. That child could have had scarlet fever or been bled with leeches. The tools available to country doctors then were minimal, but what they could do was be more present for patients in their home, serving as a comfort to the family when clinical science had a ways to go.
