ABSTRACT
This chapter examines what differentiates the generalist from the specialist way of doing medicine. It provides the idea that the distinctions are largely perceptual. A medical gaze sounds a promising thing for a doctor to confer upon a patient as a prelude to fruitful action. Some doctors - they tend to be specialists - do their medical gazing through a lens of fixed focal length. They have only one pre-set field of view, giving only one perspective and taking in only a fixed amount of the patient's background and setting. Medical students are taught that the doctor-as-person, with idiosyncratic thought processes and undisciplined reactions, is as little welcome in the consulting room as the embarrassing cousin at a family gathering. The astronauts knew about 'swivel', their gaze taking in their own inner responses as well as the marvels they were witnessing through the windows of their spacecraft.
