How language — its clarity, immediacy, and nuance — is vital to both patients and doctors, for it can overcome the split between scientific specialization and the experience of suffering. From the article:

Many of the great doctors have been writers, and those who have not have required writers to set down their insights. Hippocrates, Galen, Maimonides, Paracelsus and Vesalius all left behind chronicles of their work and methods and of the principles driving them. So did historic female doctors such as Trota of Salerno and Hildegard von Bingen, both of whom wrote of their medical work in the 12th century. Medical knowledge is particularly cumulative, and it cannot accrue without words. These doctors’ greatness lay not only in their discernments, but also in their recording of them. Indeed, Galen titled one of his volumes That the Best Physician Is also a Philosopher. The division between humanism and science is recent, an Enlightenment idea, a Cartesian duality, and like many such ideas, it served at first to advance a discourse it may now impede. The two modes of thought are now too often posed as opposites rather than as twin vocabularies for the same reality.