1st Edition

Making a Good Doctor Sources of Strength and Wisdom

Edited By Edvin Schei, Iona Heath, Peter Dorward, Caroline Engen Copyright 2026
268 Pages
by CRC Press

268 Pages
by CRC Press

‘ Doctors will love this book. It speaks to them in profoundly personal ways, and also in stimulating intellectual ways [and] full of source material to help doctors and educators shape a better world in medicine. ’ – Moira Stewart, PhD, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, Centre for Studies in Family Medicine, Western University, Canada What does it mean to be a good doctor? How do we... Read more

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.