On being a proper doctor

Abstract

‘My mum's a doctor’ number one daughter said to her latest boyfriend, who seemed more interested in the Sunday supper Yorkshire puddings than my career, ‘but my dad's a proper doctor.’ They were her italics. The definition of a ‘proper doctor’ has changed over the centuries to reflect the progress of medicine from an art form to a science. Dr William Henry Welch, one of the founding fathers of medical practice and education in the US, wrote that his father, a practitioner in Norfolk, Connecticut, in the mid-19th century, was able to make people feel better by simply entering the room. ‘The art of healing seemed to surround his physical body like an aura: it was often not his treatment but his presence that cured.’1 He was a proper doctor without the benefit of …