It is common for authors to write about healthcare "professions" and "professionals" as if it were perfectly clear what and whom the writers are discussing.
They may feel free to do so because others, preeminently William F. May, have already done such notable heavy lifting concerning the nature and the moral commitments of healthcare professions and professionals.
Nevertheless, given the ever-changing context of health care and the postmodern tendency to raise questions about accepted verities of all kinds, we at the Center felt that a further look at healthcare professions and professionals might be both warranted and fruitful. Have—or, perhaps better, how have—these professions and the moral agency of their practitioners evolved in an age of managed care and healthcare nonreform? In a culture that stresses "spirituality," often at the expense of or as a substitute for religion, is there still such a thing as a professional "calling"? If so, what does it look like, and how can we know it when we see it? Where do the human spirit and the divine fit, or intersect, in becoming and remaining a healthcare professional?
From a practice standpoint, in a medical profession that has historically prized clinical detachment and construed William Osler's virtue of aequanimitas as "objectivity," is there a place for relational closeness, even intimacy, between physician and patient? In a related vein, when health care is so driven by the ethos of science and technology, must its professions and professionals be similarly driven? Can or dare they consider other human and social factors, such as relationships, culture, community, financial straits, religion—to say nothing of claims they make publicly about "care of the whole person"? And what of the relationship between self-interest and what May called "disinterested giving and receiving" in the professions when, to many professionals, the power of the marketplace seems so all-consuming (pun intended)? Authors of the following articles raise and address these questions, and more, in this Bulletin.
Readers will rightly surmise that this issue's articles were solicited and, with one exception, received prior to the dreadful and unforgettable events of September 11, 2001. As Robert Baum notes (p.7), the heroic and ultimately self-sacrificing conduct of so many professionals in New York have shown all too vividly what the professional commitment to put others' interests first could and perhaps should mean. The courage and the self-giving of those rescuers and healers who gave their lives for the sake of others is a memorial to professional dedication and human solidarity—a monument of character, invisible yet palpable, in the very space where the Trade Center towers once stood.
