What does it cost to care? Contemporary debates about medicine and the health system often return to this question through the language of burnout, emotional labor, and clinical detachment. Yet the problem is far from modern. At the beginning of the Hippocratic treatise De flatibus, a speech intended to be delivered before an audience and…
Author: Giulia La Cognata
Giulia La Cognata graduated in Historical Sciences from the University of Milan in 2024. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Classics at the University of Edinburgh. Her research, Doctors Without Borders: The Professional and Social Identity of Physicians in the Greek World, explores how physicians were honoured and integrated within Greek communities, focusing on their professional and social roles. Before moving to Edinburgh, she worked in Italy as an EMT on an ambulance, an experience that deepened her interest in the relationship between medicine and society.
Don’t Judge a Doctor by Their Coat – or Do We? The Fabric of Medical Authority Between Hippocrates and Us
Before moving to the United Kingdom, my life looked very different. I lived in a small town and I worked as an EMT on an ambulance. Professionally, it lasted only a few months, but on a human level – as a student and as a volunteer – it shaped me for more than three years….