1st Edition
Making a Good Doctor Sources of Strength and Wisdom
Chapter 1. Beginning
Peter Dorward
Chapter 2. I Dread This
Victoria Schei
Chapter 3. Framing the Problem: Suffering and Knowing in the World of Things
Caroline Engen and Peter Dorward
Chapter 4. When Death Comes to Work
Margot de Rijke
Chapter 5. Medicine: We Make It; It Makes Us
Eivind Alexander Valestrand and J. Donald Boudreau
Chapter 6. Levels of Experience
Lara Kesseler and Peter Dorward
Chapter 7. Steps Toward Deep Listening
Ronald M. Epstein
Chapter 8. Your Everyday, My Once in a Lifetime
Knut Eirik Eliassen
Chapter 9. Dialogue and Healing
John Launer
Chapter 10. Attending to the Unsaid: On Knowing, Care, and Strength
Caroline Engen and Edvin Schei
Chapter 11. I’ll Take it With me When I Go
Knut Eirik Eliassen
Chapter 12. Alienation, Resonance and the Formation of Physicians
Edvin Schei
Chapter 13. Second Thoughts – Reflections on Early Medical Career Experiences
Karl Erik Müller and Caroline Engen
Chapter 14. Wisdom in Medical Practice
J. Donald Boudreau
Chapter 15. Why I Run
Lizzie Wastnedge
Chapter 16. Dualisms, Bread and Roses, and Finding Joy
Iona Heath
Chapter 17. The Planning of Magic
Edvin Schei and Peter Dorward
Chapter 18. End
Peter Dorward
Biography
Edvin Schei
I was, long ago, a critical medical student who hoped in vain that medicine would teach me about people and make me wiser. Slowly, learning from my patients, I found my way as a family doctor, a teacher of medical students, a researcher in medical education, and an advocate of human connection in medicine. I have been a visiting scholar at Boston University, McGill University in Montreal, and Maastricht University. I have learned that medicine, and patients, profit from philosophy, friendliness, humour and honesty.
Iona Heath
I worked as a general practitioner in a deprived inner-city area of London for almost 35 years. It was an amazing place to work and I learnt almost everything I know from the courage and endurance of my patients and from colleagues from across the world but perhaps especially from Scandinavia. I discovered that the work of general practice has such an astonishing breath that reading almost any book, fiction or non-fiction, has something to teach us about the human condition that is relevant to our work. Reading taught me to write and writing has helped me to think.
Peter Dorward
I am a family physician, and medical teacher, based in Edinburgh, Scotland. I have a long interest in the intersections of medicine, philosophy and literature, and talk and write extensively on this subject. I am the author of ‘The Human Kind, A Doctor’s Stories from the Heart of Medicine” (Bloomsbury 2018)
Caroline Engen
I trained as a cancer researcher before turning to psychiatry and a scholarly path in the philosophy of medicine. This path continues to shape both my clinical work and academic inquiry, and has taught me to see suffering not only as something to be known and treated, but as something that reveals. My work largely focuses on epistemological and ethical dimensions of contemporary medicine.






