Cross-disciplinary Learning in Medicine

The Hippocratic physicians also gave to us, as a bequest, a code of ethics which you will learn more about later this week. They generated the famous book, The Aphorisms of Hippocrates. This is a collect of pithy, sententious statements about how to care for sick people and how to live a moral life. 

The most famous of these aphorisms is the first: “Life is short. The Art is long. Opportunity is fleeing. Experience is delusive. Judgment is difficult.” Because the word Art is capitalized, it refers to the “Art of medicine”. You may, therefore read the aphorism as follows: “Life is short. The Art [of medicine] is long. Opportunity is fleeting. Experience is delusive. Judgment is difficult.” If we break there five phrases down into their component parts, there is much to be learned.

“Life is short. The Art is long.” This means that no doctor can learn everything that he or she needs to know in one lifetime.

“Opportunity is fleeting.” This means that the patient will come to see you at a particular point in his or her disease. You will only be offered a small window of opportunity with which make a diagnosis.

“Experience is delusive.” This means that your individual experience as a physician can be deceptive. You must be cautious about thinking that you’ve learned something from “that interesting case I recently saw.” You will now be called upon to use evidence based medicine. You will use statistics to combine the experience of thousands of patients and doctors.

“Judgment is difficult.” Every physician must learn judgment. You must learn when to operate and when not to operate, when to call in a consultant, and which therapy is best for the individual patient.

(http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2005/09/medicalwelcome.html)