The importance of the sociable expert

"Vimla Patel and Guy Groen have explored the sociable expert by comparing the clinical skills of brilliant but novice medical students to doctors with several years of experience behind them. The experienced doctor, as one would expect, is a more accurate diagnostician. This is due in large part to the fact that he or she tends to be more open to oddity and particularity in patients, whereas the medical student is more likely to be a formalist, working by the book, rather rigidly applying general rules to particular cases. Moreover, the experienced doctor thinks in larger units of time, not just backward to cases in the past but, more interestingly, forward, trying to see into the patient's indeterminate future. The novice, lacking a storehouse of clinical histories, has trouble imagining what might be an individual patient's fate. The experienced doctor focuses on a patient's becoming; raw talent thinks strictly in terms of immediate cause and effect. The craftsman's capacity of prehension, discussed in our chapter on the hand, is thus elaborated in long term medical practice. Treating others as whole persons in time is one mark of sociable expertise."

Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman [pg. 247]