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doctor to preserve respect and if possible, love, for human beings, even when there is little evidence of respectability and less than nothing to attract love, and the cheapening effect of close and long contact has always to be resisted. There is always something esoteric about medicine, as you can see very easily from its history and from the stories and legends of miraculous cures and mutations, and with it all goes a colossal opportunity for prestige and power. A rewarding field for the truly compassionate who are well trained in true science, but it holds uncanny opportunities for misdoing where the gifts and character of the practitioner are either [crossed out: wrong] insufficient or bad, and the moral frame of social acceptance and tradition has deteriorated."

  "That sounds kind of frightening, Doctor.  Even from the

city docks where I spend my day, the deterioration looks pretty clear. And I wasn't very much impressed by compassion or science in those young folks who wrote the orders for me when I was lying there in that hospital bed. A lot of them were foreign, mostly oriental. Could be that I couldn't always understand them."

  "I don't think you should have had to.  It's not enough to

take x-ray pictures to diagnose fractured ribs, skulls and clavicles and call in a neurologist to decipher nerve injuries, and then order low-salt diets and physiotherapy. A doctor should know more than what is considered good to do for whatever is wrong. You were in the situation of one active and busy man converted in one blinding minute into a human wreck, with all the attendant shattering emotions. In my opinion you should have had your own doctor in charge, the one you trusted, who would have sat down every day beside your bed and adjusted every detail of your days. He should have been your devoted friend and listened to whatever thoughts were tormenting you, and sustained you with every human insight."

  "How are you going to teach all that in medical school Doctor?

And besides, they're always too busy."

  "A lot of that stuff is nonsense.  It's said so much that

everybody comes to believe it, and then one day you notice that there's