Catholic Medical Quarterly Volume 74(3) Aug 2024
A doctors prayer
A physician’s prayer
Sir
Robert Hutchison was physician and paediatrician to the London Hospital
and to the Hospital for Sick children at Great Ormond Street in the later
part of the nineteenth and early part of the 20th century. He was a
medical writer and edited textbooks including Clinical Methods and Food
and the Principles of Dietetics.
Many of Hutchison's clinical sayings became popular with his contemporaries and future generations.
He wrote this prayer in 1953.It makes perfect sense 70 years later.
"From inability to let well alone;
from too much zeal for the
new and contempt for what is old;
from putting knowledge before wisdom,
science before art, and cleverness before common sense;
from treating
patients as cases;
and from making the cure of the disease more
grievous than the endurance of the same,
Good Lord, deliver us."