A Fortunate Man: The Stories of a Country Doctor by John Berger

"It is generally assumed that doctors take a professional view of suffering"

"Doctors use a technical, entirely unemotional language".

"Increasing specialization encourages an increasingly scientific view of illness". 

"He never separates an illness from the total personality of the patient- in this sense, he is the opposite of a specialist."

"Most important of all, he considers that it is his duty to try and treat at least certain forms of unhappiness". 

"He can try to extend the meaning of sex for them. But the more he thinks of educating them - according to the demands of their very own minds and bodies before they have become resigned, before they accept life as they find it - the more he has to ask himself: by what right do I do this? It is not certain that it will make them socially happier. It is not what is expected or wanted of me. In the end he compromises - as the limitations of his energy would anyway force him to do; he helps in an individual problem , he suggests an answer here and an answer there, he tries to remove a fear without destroying the whole edifice of the morality of which it is part, he introduces the possibility of a hitherto unseen pleasure or satisfaction without extrapolating to the idea of a fundamentally different way of life."

"If the man can begin to feel recognized - and such recognition may well include aspects of his character which he has not yet recognized himself - the hopeless nature of his unhappiness will have been changed: he may even have the chance of being happy."

"How is it that Sassall is acknowledged as a good doctor?"

"He is acknowledged as a good doctor because he meets the deep but unformulated expectation of the sick for a sense of fraternity. He recognizes them. Sometimes he fails - often because he has missed a critical opportunity and the patient's suppressed resentment becomes too hard to break through - but there is about him the constant will of a man trying to recognize."

"It is as though when he talks or listens to a patient, he is also touching them with his hands so as to be less likely to misunderstand: and it is as though, when he is physically examining a patient, they were also conversing."

"Previously the sense of mastery which Sassell gained was the result of the skill with which he dealt with emergencies. The possible complications would all appear to develop within his own field: they were medical complications. He remained the central character. 

Now the patient is the central character. He tries to recognize each patient and, having recognized him, he tries to set an example for him - not a morally improving example, but an example wherein the patient can recognize himself... he 'becomes' each patient in order to 'improve' that patient. He 'becomes' the patient by offering him hi own example back. He 'improves' him by curing or at least alleviating his suffering. Yet patient succeeds patient whilst he remains the same person, and so the effect is cumulative. His sense of mastery is fed by the ideal of striving toward the universal."

There is so much more in this essay, so much I cannot yet understand. In that way, I mark this as something that I must come back to, maybe repeatedly, in an attempt to build off of, and not just repeat Sassell's journey.

Interestingly, Sassell committed suicide, though many have suspected that he suffered from bipolar disorder, and never received cognitive behavioral therapy.