Virtue
What?
- Virtue is an excellence of character formed through choices and repeated practice. In the curriculum’s classical account, intellectual and moral virtue involve reason and the will, forming not only good action but a growing desire for what is good.
- A virtue helps a person become good and act well. Prudence finds a fitting action between excess and deficiency, taking the person and circumstances into account. Developing this habit takes effort before good action becomes more natural and wholehearted.
So What?
- Medicine requires more than knowing what to do. Patients need clinicians whose wisdom, compassion, honesty and discipline make them worthy of trust, and whose desires and actions are directed toward the patient’s good.
- Virtue joins knowing, desiring and doing the good, supporting an integrated life, relationships and flourishing. It is valuable in itself, not merely a tool for reputation or success. Daily choices gradually shape the person and practitioner we become.
Now What?
- Reflect on why the virtues are good and worth pursuing. Identify qualities you admire in physicians, virtues you lack, and concrete opportunities to practice them. Reframe a difficult encounter as a chance for patience or kindness.
- Let reflection lead to deliberate action. Choose fitting acts and repeat them with patience and perseverance, expecting difficulty at first. Attend to habits of thought, desire, emotion and behavior as well as visible performance, and keep the kind of physician you hope to become in view.
Clinical Case
You are a first-year medical student, starting the most important part of your journey to become a physician. You begin the school year with eagerness, excited to finally enter formal training for the career you have been pursuing for years. Your role models, the men and women who inspired you to become a physician, have given you a picture of the kind of doctor you want to be: hardworking, organized, effective, patient, kind and wise.
In your first week of school, you meet your assigned student active-learning group, and one of your group-mates starts to rub you the wrong way. You figure that should be an issue; you can just try to be friendly and patient, maybe you will even end up becoming friends. As the semester goes on, however, you find yourself becoming more and more irritated with him. You find yourself making snarky comments, getting frustrated easily, and no longer being able to focus on the task at hand. Even when you are not with him, you find yourself ruminating on how annoying you find him, and complaining about him to your friends.
The enthusiasm and vigor with which you started medical school begins to wane, and it seems hard to find the time to get everything done. You are exhausted from the long days in the evening, and often decide you are too tired to study. You decide to go to bed early and get up early, skipping your workout to finish your studying, but end up scrolling through social media on your phone for an hour before getting around to going to bed. When your alarm goes off in the morning, you hit snooze.
You find the quality of your classwork slipping further and further. You are constantly distracted and on edge, and though you seem to have no free time, your phone reports that your screen time adds up to about three hours every day. Your irritability starts to expand beyond your study mate, and you find yourself being short with your friends and complaining often.
Discussion Questions
- What habits is the student forming? Are they good, bad or neutral?
- How much arises from deliberate choice, and how much develops without attention?
- What could the student do to form the character of a good physician?
- What end currently guides these actions? How would a clearer aim change them?
- How do habits form in your own life? Which choices could make their formation more intentional?
Sources
Sources: LearnWorlds lessons and the earlier Canva one-pager.