ABSTRACT
The juxtaposition of two images of medicine begins to suggest what has changed. The first is a late nineteenth-century painting (later an engraving) by Sir Luke Fildes, entitled ‘The Doctor’. Physician Alfred Tauber, who chose it as the cover for his recent meditation on medicine and its ethics, describes the painting and its significance as an icon of medicine:
This Victorian pastoral drama shows a country doctor sitting contemplatively [leaning forward at a 45 degree angle, one hand supporting his chin; the figure is utterly still yet poised to move forward] at the bedside of a sick child, whose parents look on in dismay and fear. Portraying the medical reality of that period just before the explosion of scientific medicine, Fildes’s evocation of the empathic doctor, helpless in the face of nature’s ravage and yet steadfastly committed to remaining with his young patient, both reflected the sentimentality of that era and also stated clearly the ethical relationship of the physician to his charge … Today, the painting still occupies a prominent place at the Tate Gallery in London, and I think it commands attention not so much for its large size and effective naturalism but more so because Fildes captured a human relation that is of time immemorial, and we respond instinctively to his depiction of this relation. The painting is a powerful image of my own philosophy of medicine – not the posture of a helpless physician watching the relentless scourge of nature, but the physician as empathic witness.
