The future of medicine lies in nurturing our “uniquely human” skills

Last month, I was teaching ethics to medical undergraduates in Jammu, India. They were the cream of the crop: students from different Indian states with mightily impressive performances in their exams. Their home was a new, state of the art government hospital.In the talk, I focussed on the human side of medicine and shared the warning of Jean Bernard, a pioneering haematologist and the first president of the French National Advisory Ethics Council for Health and Life Sciences. Bernard wrote in his 2000 book L’Avenir de la Médecine: “The modern doctor, surrounded by machines and with his head full of numbers and statistics, should be careful not to distance himself too much from the patient. On the contrary, thanks to medical and technological progress, the medical act becomes all the more important.”1 This injunction seemed apposite in the high-tech, intimidating environment of the new hospital.When I returned home, I took…
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