A consideration of the qualities of a ‘good’ doctor with some help from the humanities

Abstract

It is a reasonable generalisation that most doctors aim to be skilled in the practice of medicine; they try to be ‘good’ doctors. Also, despite frequent news stories illustrating the shortcoming of doctors, surveys show that contemporary society holds the medical profession in high regard;1 doctors are generally considered to be ‘good’ people despite obvious exceptions such as Dr Harold Shipman. But what do we mean by ‘goodness’ in medical practice? This essay uses sources from the arts and the humanities to explore this concept of ‘goodness’ and to consider the qualities of a ‘good’ doctor in a contemporary medical context. Let us start with a consideration of a picture of a ‘good’ doctor. Van Gogh (1853–1890), produced several portraits of his own physician, Dr Paul-Ferdinand Gachet. Van Gogh was a prolific artist, producing more than two thousand paintings, drawings, and sketches, also leaving detailed descriptions of his colourful life in letters and diaries. In a letter to his sister, Wilhemina Van Gogh, he wrote that in this painting he had tried to portray Gachet's ‘sad but gentle, yet clear and intelligent’ expression.2 A foxglove on the table represents Gachet's medical status and, possibly, the digitalis he prescribed for Van Gogh's mania. (It has been proposed that xanthopsia caused by digoxin poisoning explains Van Gogh's preoccupation with the colour yellow, though this seems unlikely.) Van Gogh started painting in Belgium moving to Paris in 1886 where he met the impressionist artists Pissarro, Monet, and Gauguin. Although his paintings now sell for millions of pounds he failed to make any money in his own lifetime, his penury a constant preoccupation. He was a heavy drinker with a taste for absinthe and had bursts of manic activity followed by periods of depression. To improve his health he moved south to …