Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Michel de Montaigne

  • Empathy or sympathy?

    JMS Pearce Hull, England   David Jeffrey’s splendid paper about emotions and empathy1 points out that Sir William Osler claimed that by excluding emotions, doctors gained a special objective insight into the patient’s suffering. But when Osler advised students that “insensibility is not only an advantage, but a positive necessity in the exercise of a…

  • Michel de Montaigne in his circular library

    At the age of thirty-eight, in 1571, the aristocratic Michel de Montaigne retired from public life and “servitude at the court” in order to spend in his château “what little remains of his life, now more than half had run out.” He passed the next ten years or so “in the bosom of the learned…

  • Montaigne’s Essays: Emotions and empathy

    David JeffreyEdinburgh, Scotland The term empathy was coined a little over a hundred years ago and since then its definition has evolved. At first empathy was regarded as a sharing of emotions, but modern medicine emphasizes cognitive aspects of the concept.1 Regarding the sharing of emotion with suspicion has led to a form of professionalism…