Ward rounds: What goes around comes around

摘要

Long before evidence-based medicine-long before treatments that worked reliably, in fact—people needed doctors. What for, if not to provide a perfectly designed medical or surgical intervention as part of a well-honed treatment pathway? One answer lies in a painting by the Victorian artist Sir Luke Fildes, The Doctor, in which a physician watches carefully over a sick child. The story behind it is instructive: Fildes produced the picture in memory of the death of his son some years previously. As one of Fildes' other sons, Luke Val, recorded in his biography of his father, "The character and bearing of their doctor throughout the time of their anxiety made a deep impression on my parents". In other words, although the doctor could not save the life of Fildes' child, the gift of his time and concern was an important therapeutic intervention in itself.