PEDIATRICS Vol. 55 No. 5 May 1975, pp. 598
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ILLITERACY IN PHYSICIANS

M. A. Simpson

The psychological, social, and political illiteracy of so many doctors has helped to make them constitute part of the health care problem, rather than part of its solution. Over the last few centuries, we have progressively focused on understanding man, his functions and malfunctions at ever smaller levels—the system, the organ, the cell, and the molecule. Now while retaining the great advantages these perspectives have gained, we must move conceptually in the opposite direction, and see the problems in the wider prespective—the dyad, the family, the community and beyond. While doctors have become more and more specialized, their patients are perversely becoming less so.