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When one has reached 60 years of age it is advisable to gather together and communicate what one knows or believes one knows. If one is lucky one finds a suitable form for this: for some this means donning the solemn robe of serious aspiration, others will recite their wisdom with a raised index-finger to emphasise its importance, others again chat and instruct in an entertaining way; I cannot help but talk to myself, this is the way in which I have expressed myself ever since my childhood.
What happens inside me when I am confronted as a doctor by a human being who is a patient? Nothing else than what happens to other doctors: I try to find out what kind of a person is asking me for help. With this I am already deep into examination and treatment, the decisive thing has happened already: for it is decisive that I am dealing with a human being, that this human being is suffering and demands help from me. Whether this person is ill in the accepted medical sense or not has nothing to do with what happens first; it is unimportant whether I, the doctor, consider him ill or not, he does not expect knowledge from me but help. It is not the illness but the human being that needs help. As a doctor I am not concerned with the illness but with the human being.
The idea that the doctor has to make a diagnosis in order to be able to help is still predominant in medical practice, though gradually other approaches are gaining ground. But the general public cannot understand that a doctor could do his work without caring about diagnosis, about categorising a specific illness; even the amateur doctor, the quack in common usage, reinforces the public's wish to consider illness as something of importance. It will be decades before the diagnosis of the human being will be a general custom. The mistakes of the