Show Notes
It is difficult to overstate the achievements of Richard Clarke Cabot (1868-1939) a relatively little-known, old-moneyed physician of the early 20th century who was far ahead of his time in how much he contributed, and how willing he was to question his own limitations. Cabot's achievements include: creation and self-funding of the first medical social work service and establishment of the fields of clinical pastoral care and medical ethics. His work offered seminal contributions to the fields of hematology, cardiology, infectious disease, and medical education – including the clinical pathologic conference, case-based learning and the differential diagnosis; the first large-scale randomized experiment in the history of criminology; the science of medical error; and introducing the concept of a group insurance plan. He authored countless books, articles and textbooks. Most remarkable, considering Cabot's extraordinary intellect, was his openness to reflecting on his own deficits as a physician, including getting diagnoses wrong, and describing his own failures in seeing the humanity of his patients. Joy, curiosity, and generosity were among his distinctive personal characteristics. So, why is he not more widely remembered? Perhaps because of one of his greatest attributes: he pointed out things about his profession that the medical establishment didn't want to hear.
More from On Becoming a Healer
As On Becoming a Healer begins its seventh year, Stefan turns the questions on Saul: What does it actually mean to "become a healer"—and why does that idea remain at the center of both the podcast and Saul's 2020 book, On Becoming a Healer: The Journey from Patient Care to Caring About Your Patients? Beginning with an encounter in which a patient's worsening back pain could not be understood apart from a devastating recent trauma, Stefan and Saul explore the difference between treating a clinical problem and engaging with the person experiencing it. They consider why genuine engagement is not friendship, forced intimacy, "good bedside manner," or additional emotional labor; how boundary clarity makes openness safer; and why medical education has such difficulty teaching something that cannot be reduced to a script or competency. In a profession increasingly shaped by financialization, bureaucracy, and the efficient-task-completer mindset, it is not enough to ask what physicians are against. We must also ask what they are for. This episode argues that engagement is not an optional grace note in medical care. It is medicine's missing center—and the foundation of a healing interaction.
What happens when a healthcare system organized around profit repeatedly gets in the way of doing what is right for patients? Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) calls one consequence moral injury: the distress physicians experience when the system prevents them from providing the care they believe patients need. PNHP president Diljeet Singh, MD, DrPH, joins Stefan and Saul to discuss the organization's recent report on moral injury and the financialization of American medicine. Saul strongly shares PNHP's commitment to universal health care—but challenges whether the language of moral injury puts too much emphasis on what the system does to physicians and too little on physicians' own agency and responsibility within that system. What follows is a candid and provocative exchange that begins with substantial agreement about what is wrong with American health care and the need for universal coverage, but moves into harder questions about moral distress, physician complicity, professional responsibility—and how much courage we should expect from doctors when doing the right thing comes at a personal cost.
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Most of us who care for patients can remember seeing a name on the schedule and feeling our heart sink. What makes some clinical relationships so difficult? Is it something about the patient—or something about the interaction itself? Dr Jeffrey Jackson has spent more than two decades studying this question. His research has shown that difficult encounters are associated not only with patient characteristics but also with physician factors, including the clinician's approach to psychosocial issues. In this conversation, we explore what his work can teach us about why encounters become difficult, how trust can gradually emerge, and why some of the patients that physicians initially dread eventually become among the most meaningful to care for. Along the way, we discuss chronic pain, personality disorders, longitudinal relationships in primary care, the role of physician self-awareness, and the difference between caring for patients and trying to control them. This episode asks what it means to remain present with patients whose suffering—and whose behavior—challenge us the most.
Over the past several years, contextualizing care has surfaced repeatedly on On Becoming a Healer. In 2025, contextualizing care was incorporated into new Foundational Competencies for Undergraduate Medical Education. Around the same time, co-host Saul Weiner worked with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) to develop an online course designed to teach these skills, called Contextualizing Care for the Clinician (IHI Open School). Now that the course has been added to IHI's subscription-based Open School curriculum, making it available to learners at hundreds of subscribing institutions, we thought it would be a good time to revisit several conversations from past episodes that illustrate what contextualizing care is, why it matters, and how we can teach it.