This program will develop Edmund Pellegrino’s account of medicine’s ideals. Pellegrino begins with the clinical encounter: the meeting between a person who is ill and a person who professes to heal. We will unpack its moral structure by asking what Pellegrino means when he calls the encounter a healing relationship. The answer attends to the “passive” aspects of a physician’s agency. Physicians are patients when they receive the person who is ill. This reception prefigures the responsibility of physicians. Thinking about physicians as patients also provides basic insights into their fiduciary obligations, to individual patients and to the public at large.
Niel Rosen, JD, PhD, is the Program Director, Professionalism, Ethics & Humanities at Rowan University School of Osteopathic Medicine in Stratford, NJ.
