August 2007 | Back to Table of Contents

Defining Professionalism

In director Richard Brooks’ 1966 movie The Professionals, Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin starred as gunslingers hired by a millionaire to retrieve his wife, who had been kidnapped by a Mexican desperado. Lancaster and Marvin’s brand of professional is light-years from the medical professionals discussed by Robert Kennedy, Ph.D., and David Hutchinson, M.D., in the following articles, suggesting that the definition of “professional” is in the eyes of the beholder. As Hutchinson writes, “Professionalism is a grand and nebulous topic.”

Indeed, at times, as they describe medical professionals, Hutchinson and Kennedy seem as if they’re writing about different people. Kennedy’s professional wields his privileged knowledge to solve the problems of a society to which he is indebted. Hutchinson’s medical professional builds trusting, healing relationships with his patients as lifelong partners. One treats the community, the other the person.

Yet the themes in these two essays are more kin than contrary. Both Kennedy and Hutchinson describe doctors who see people as the goal but not the object of their work, who use but don’t worship technology, and who invest in but don’t become overwhelmed by their patients’ cases. For both, the relationship between doctor and patient is not a transaction but a transformation governed by a code that seals the therapeutic pact.

Like the millionaire’s wife, physicians increasingly feel as if they’re held hostage to the demands of government regulators, third-party payers, and corporate employers. In response, they’re recalling their professional roots and reclaiming what it means to be a doctor.

Offering us differing views, Kennedy and Hutchinson get us a little closer to redefining what that is.—Charles R. Meyer, M.D.