This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Patient-Physician Relationship, Other  • Alert me on articles by topic

by Kathryn Montgomery, 246 pp, $39.50, ISBN 0-19-518712-1, New York, NY, Oxford University Press, 2006.

JAMA. 2006;295:2080-2081.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Kathryn Montgomery, PhD, has written a thoughtful and provocative book that challenges us to reconceptualize our assumptions about how physicians think in the clinical encounter, how physicians-in-training are taught, and how physicians and patients interact.

In the introductory chapter, Montgomery, who is professor of bioethics and medical humanities at Northwestern University, starts by stating that clinical medicine is not a science. Furthermore, she suggests that the widely held and unquestioned assumption that clinical medicine is a science and that it follows the scientific method leads to approaches to medical education that are too harsh and to clinical practice that is too impersonal and, as a result, unsatisfying to physicians and patients. Rather than considering clinical medicine a science, she proposes that it be conceptualized as a rational, science-using practice. She draws on Aristotle's phronesis—the flexible interpretive capacity that enables moral reasoners to determine the best action to take when . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Donald E. Moore, Jr, PhD, Reviewer
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
Nashville, Tenn
don.moore@vanderbilt.edu