Consumer-driven health care is here to stay and will evolve as the American answer to meet the needs of the uninsured and the wealthy. How should the health care profession relate to the society it serves when that society treats it as just one more lucrative service industry? This volume helps to answer that question. New and seasoned professionals alike can ground themselves in the principles that underlie the vocation of healing. The contributors to this volume are to be commended in providing the anchors to professionalism. It is a gift to society of great worth.

Linda Emanuel, Buehler Center on Aging, Northwestern University

Many physicians and educators propose a simple solution for today's moral crisis in medicine. 'Let's teach professionalism,' they say, as if professionalism were a foreign language, or an all-purpose set of rules. In Healing as Vocation, editors Parsi and Sheehan reject such superficial notions of medical professionalism. They present the reader with a series of fine essays by some of the best writers in the field. Each of these pieces sheds light on a different aspect of the complex character of medical virtue and the healing profession. A deeply provocative work.

Jack Coulehan, Head, Division of Medicine in Society, SUNY at Stony Brook