The essence of the art of medicine

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.