“You can’t learn ethics or compassion. You either have it or you don’t.”

I’ve often thought of her statement in the years since. Is bedside manner something we are born with, or is it something we can learn?

While most of medical education and training is about the nuts and bolts of clinical care — how to treat hypertension, how to manage a ventilator, how to take out a gallbladder — the process also involves learning how to be “a doctor.” As opposed to lessons covered in textbooks and classrooms, this kind of learning is done through modeling, or what medical sociologist F. W. Hafferty has called the “informal” or “hidden curriculum.”