To the Editor: Your thoughtful editorial comment1 in the 21 August issue laments that the essence of the art of our profession was potentially diminished recently by the report of a working party of the Royal college of Physicians of London.2

My medical dictionaries and textbooks are curiously silent on the notion of an “art of medicine”, so I went to “the source” and discovered that “Life is short, and the Art long” comes from quotes of popular Latin authors as “Ars longa, vita brevis” — in turn from Hippocrates’ original Greek,3

A native Greek-speaking medical colleague of mine points out that the Greek word used in the quote implies “long through to the end” — presumably the end of one’s career or the end of one’s life. So we (and Hippocrates) are evidently referring to a rather grand concept of the art of medicine, not just a narrow view implied by the term “judgement”, as proposed by the working party.

I see judgement as being but one of many essentials of the art of our profession, and agree with Van Der Weyden’s assertion that the proposed use of the term “judgement” in place of “art” is indeed reductionist and should be rejected.

To the Editor: I agree with Van Der Weyden’s quotation from Osler: “The practice of medicine is an art, based on science.”1 In my medical training in the 1960s, I was taught that medicine was both an art and a science — perhaps more the former than the latter, given that the technological age was not yet fully upon us. It saddens me that there is now an almost inexorable trend towards the use of advanced technology in medicine and away from human interaction between doctors and patients. I do not believe in reducing humans to mere numbers on a pathology results form or images on a computer-driven x-ray monitor. This is what helping patients “judge” which path to take “through the indeterminacies” back to health1 suggests.

Gordon expressed similar sentiments in an earlier article:2

As a “doctor” — in the sense of a modern version of an ancient healer — I accept that my role is “to cure sometimes, to relieve often, to comfort always”.3 There is cold comfort if we lose the “art” of medicine.