The concept of mortal time is useful for exploring how hospice care frameworks might help nonhospice clinicians find calm in practice.

How should clinical environments bolster both empathy and calm socially, not just individually, to build solidarity and make space for care?

Meditation on images of corporeal suffering were once part of a “spiritual ordeal” that can still provoke a kind of transformation key to health professionalism.

To improve health outcomes, clinicians must move quickly yet operate slowly enough to center empathy in practice.

There are a few reasons why incentivizing clinicians to spend more time with patients can improve health outcomes.

Osler’s contributions to the philosophy and practice of medicine foreground characteristics of a compassionate caregiver, including imperturbability and equanimity.

In recent years, unrest, protests, and uprisings about class and race conflict have compelled many health professionals to question and to stand in solidarity with communities.

Medicine has been defined by doing, but bias, error, and burnout are potential consequences of speed and constant activity.

For dying patients and their loved ones to make informed decisions, physicians must share adequate information about prognoses, prospective benefits and harms of specific interventions, and costs.

Fragmentation in US health care delivery streams and shortcomings in formal quality measures mean that transparency could be more useful to policymakers and regulators than patients.