ABSTRACT
The newly elected President of the British medical association, Professor Pali Hungin, describes a crisis amongst doctors resulting from structural factors—particularly chronic under-resourcing. Collaboration and gendered division of labour were the primary forces behind the success of Ice Age hunting and gathering groups, where small, mobile groups must have adopted “congregation” as a core social value. Doctors suffering stress and burnout primarily need mutuality, or accessible and trustworthy support networks. For doctors, confession goes against the grain of professional veneer, where identity construction is grounded in identification with the norms of medical culture as heroic, masculine and tempered. The absence of presence runs throughout doctors’ interactions: patients tell incomplete, fragmentary and sometimes incoherent stories so that the doctor must inhabit the untold story of the patient as much as the told.
