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What Is Empathy and Can It Be Taught?
Abstract
Empathy is the "almost magical" emotion that persons or objects arouse in us as projections of our feelings. Empathy requires passion, more so than does equanimity, so long cherished by physicians. Medical students lose some of their empathy as they learn science and detachment, and hospital residents lose the remainder in the weariness of overwork and in the isolation of the intensive care units that modern hospitals have become. Conversations about experiences, discussions of patients and their human stories, more leisure and unstructured contemplation of the humanities help physicians to cherish empathy and to retain their passion. Physicians need rhetoric as much as knowledge, and they need stories as much as journals if they are to be more empathetic than computers.
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Cited by
The Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy: Development and Preliminary Psychometric Data
Hojat, M., Mangione, S., Nasca, T. J., Cohen, M. J. M., Gonnella, J. S., Erdmann, J. B., Veloski, J., & Magee, M. (2001) · Educational and Psychological Measurement · doi:10.1177/00131640121971158 · Cited by 1,049
An empirical study of decline in empathy in medical school
Hojat, M., Mangione, S., Nasca, T. J., Rattner, S., Erdmann, J. B., Gonnella, J. S., & Magee, M. (2004) · Medical Education · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2929.2004.01911.x · Cited by 864
Fallowfield, L., Jenkins, V., Farewell, V., Saul, J., Duffy, A., & Eves, R. (2002) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(02)07810-8 · Cited by 854
How Do Distress and Well-being Relate to Medical Student Empathy? A Multicenter Study
Thomas, M. R., Dyrbye, L. N., Huntington, J. L., Lawson, K. L., Novotny, P. J., Sloan, J. A., & Shanafelt, T. D. (2007) · Journal of General Internal Medicine · doi:10.1007/s11606-006-0039-6 · Cited by 616
Dignity and the essence of medicine: the A, B, C, and D of dignity conserving care
Chochinov, H. M. (2007) · BMJ · doi:10.1136/bmj.39244.650926.47 · Cited by 512
Metadata
- Authors
- Spiro, H.
- Venue
- Annals of Internal Medicine
- Publisher
- American College of Physicians
- Published
- 1992-05-15
- Volume
- 116
- Issue
- 10
- Pages
- 843-846
- ISSN
- 0003-4819 (ISSN-L)
- 1539-3704
- OpenAlex
- W1980940875
- Cited by
- 367
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 5.46
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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