Ancient answers to modern maladies: the art of actively seeking out the patient’s voice

In an elegantly argued paper, focusing on the emotionally and culturally loaded experience of receiving a heart transplant, Margrit Shildrick, Patricia McKeever, Susan Abbey and Heather Ross charge the medical system with a perverse refusal to acknowledge this self-evident truth. 6 Instead the mechanical attributes and advantages of the spare and gifted body part are emphasised, with scant acknowledgment made of the phenomenological consequences of taking someone else's heart to be your own. For another, while it may be hard to learn how to play each other's games, and perhaps impossible to really know what it means, for another person, to live with serious illness or to be dispossessed, misunderstood and unheard, I for one am convinced it's worth the effort. Because whatever the gods have in store for us, there will come a day for us all when we will want and need someone else to make the effort.