The Person in a State of Sickness: The Doctor-Patient Relationship Reconsidered

In this article, we discuss the ideas of Eric J. Cassell about the patient-professional relationship. We argue that his approach combines in an interesting way features from the literature on patient autonomy and paternalistic practices. We suggest that these seemingly paternalistic features of practicing medicine, which are widely either ignored or condemned in bioethical discussion, are of vital significance in medical practice. In the first sections of the article, we describe the main features of Cassell’s understanding of the sick person and his version of personalized medicine. We pay particular attention to his notion of information control and compare his ideas about conversation with patients to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s analysis of patient-professional dialogue. In the latter part of the article, we explore through a couple of examples the implications these ideas have for medical practice.