Death of the personal doctor

1The experience of illness with its threat to our survival reduces us all to childlike dependence. We need somebody to take away both the pain of disease and the pain of uncertainty. That somebody must be invested with trust: trust to do what is best for us irrespective of other competing claims on time and energy. The British Medical Journal has in recent years published contributions under the general title Personal View. Many of these are physicians’ descriptions of their own experience of illness. Almost without exception these accounts are not critical of the quality of technical care, but catalogue failures of communication, understanding, and empathy. It is 35 years since Theodore Fox published his paper The personal doctor. 2 In this paper, and subsequently in his Harveian Oration The purposes of medicine, he argued that everybody needed a personal doctor. 3