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The Algorithm and the Hippocratic Oath

Doctors need a medical humanities that does more than just help them see health and disease through a patient’s eyes.

I advised the obstetrician to perform an elective cesarean section now, in advance, while we had good working conditions, and not to wait for an emergency, where time is of the essence, and where the delay needed to induce general anesthesia might seriously injure the baby. Many largely psychological dimensions of human experience, such as unhappiness, anxiety, pain, loneliness, and spiritual confusion, have been brought into medicine’s orbit, compelling doctors to look upon them as engineering problems that demand a physical remedy. Clinical humanities will help illuminate alternative modes of thinking, such as intuition, practical wisdom, and judgment, thereby giving doctors the confidence and intellectual resources to resist the gravitational pull of rules and algorithms.

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