Defining the role of the physician: medical education, tradition, and the legal process.

Physicians today are facing numerous and powerful attacks on the exercise of many of their most basic functions. If asked to identify one source most responsible for these challenges, many physicians would name the legal profession. Legal intrusion into the medical profession goes beyond challenges to the physician's income; it threatens what many physicians believe to be the traditions that maintain their profession as a learned one and that distinguish it from other less principled and less socially responsible callings. Added to this are the incessant comments and questions issuing from yet another group, that new breed of philosophers, the bioethicistsl-a group which, unlike the legal profession, need not confront day-to-day professional ethical problems. The professional conflict and animosity that have developed between the legal and medical professions are symptomatic of something that is basic and disturbing to the traditional science and practice of medicine. Even a cursory review of the literature will reveal that physicians, lawyers, philosophers, and others (with greater or lesser degrees of insight and awareness) are currently engaged in serious reevaluations of such concepts as the definition of medicine as science and/or art, the structure and administration of effective medical curricula, and the goals of the medical profes-