FROM THE EDITOR The Physician as an Evolving Moral Actor

“Trust me, I’m a doctor! ” concludes Gene Simmons, of the classic hard rock band Kiss, in a television advertisement for the soft drink Cherry Dr. Pepper [1]. In this 2010 commercial, Simmons, Doctor Love himself, taps a deep-seated public sentiment concerning the prescriptive authority of physicians; the 30-second spot is amusing because an aging, steel-and-leather-clad musician would otherwise have no such claims to this kind of respect. Physicians have long been held in high respect. The earliest shamans and witch doctors derived authority from local deities, the practitioners themselves often undergoing ritual initiations to distinguish themselves from the rest of their communities as minor prophets [2]. As medical science evolved, so did the status of the physician. The seventeenth-century story of a man’s selling his soul to the devil was raised to tragic proportions because that man was Doctor Faustus. This fall, tens of thousands of American medical students will take part in white coat ceremonies that symbolize their initiation into the select group of modern healers. Medicine remains an august profession, but the source of the knowledge from which it