The doyen of continuing medical education, Dr Manning, has joined the doyenne of medical communications, Dr DeBakey, to write for practicing physicians a book on how to keep their professional lives fulfilled. The authors contend, and rightly so, in my opinion, that the happiest physicians are those who are good at what they do, those who keep up with what is happening in medicine, those who develop a system, an orderliness, in their practices that prevents error from creeping into their daily activities. And especially it is those physicians in whom there has been inculcated, in the elegant phrase of Alfred North Whitehead, "the habitual vision of greatness."1
At the outset I must confess bias. Both authors are friends of long-standing with whom I have worked in times past, so I would not have reviewed the book if I had not liked it.
Why did I like it? First of