Sue Wootton
Canadian physician Sir William Osler (1849-1919), sometimes called ‘the father of modern medicine’, urged doctors to maintain a lifetime habit of reading. In an address delivered at the opening of the Boston Medical Library in 1901, he said:
To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.”
But, important though it was to keep up-to-date with the latest scientific findings, he did not want clinicians to limit themselves to reading medical texts. Osler advocated also reading broadly and deeply in the humanities and literature. He believed that “for physicians to be properly educated to practice their art, knowledge of the science of medicine … must be supplemented by familiarity with the humanities.”
Historically, plays, then novels, treated medical doctors as stock characters, often quacks or figures of fun, as in the 
From memory, for memory, and in memory. 
My ears are full of screaming: the name-calling, the CAPS, the exclamation points!!! Whenever vaccination comes up online, and comments are enabled, the conversation quickly devolves into an extremity of outrage and vitriol that reads to me like ‘moral panic.’
“If you were to be crass, you could say there is a bit of a flavour of the month about it,” former Health Minister David Caygill says about mental health, during a conversation in a Christchurch cafe. It does sound crass, but it’s true. The shortfalls of our mental health system are a constant topic of discussion at the dinner table, in Parliament and in the media. Headlines claiming the system is “broken” or “on a knife edge” are frequent, and hard to ignore. You don’t have to look far to find a story about a mental health advocate calling for an independent review, or a grieving family member whose child killed themselves while in the care of services.
I trained as a physiotherapist nearly thirty years ago, and worked in acute medicine and neuro rehabilitation in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. I ended my clinical practice about seven years back, and strangely I don’t miss it terribly; one moves onto other things.