The Lost Art of Gratitude by Alexander McCall Smith

'If doctors see self-destructive behaviour, they might,' he said. You don't shake your head over your patients' behaviour, do you?' 'Priests do disapprove, don't they? Doctors don't-or shouldn't. Isabel did not think the comparison quite fitting. Doctors should subscribe to that, I think. I don't set my mind against anything human.

' Nihil humanum mihi alienum est, if I may lapse into Latin. 'But it must annoy you-being asked about medical matters.' Doctors understand all about embarrassment, you know.' Somebody comes and says, A friend of mine has this rash, you see, and I wondered what it was. There you are at a party and somebody says: I've been having these twinges of pain in my stomach. You see, you doctors must dread being buttonholed by people who want to talk about their symptoms. 'I don't like to ask about medical things,' she said. She had not consulted him professionally, but had brought the matter up over dinner not before the whole table, of course, but in the intimacy of the one-to-one conversation that people have with those sitting beside them. She had wondered about the causes of her light sleeping and had spoken about it to a friend, a specialist in sleep disorders. Then all she had to do was to tell herself that this was not the time to start thinking, and she would quickly return to sleep. The same could be done if she surfaced in the course of the night or in those melancholy small hours when both body and spirit could be at their lowest ebb. Once she made up her mind to sleep, all that she had to do was to shut her eyes and, sure enough, she would drift off. Yet Isabel had little difficulty in getting to sleep. Isabel was a light sleeper Charlie, her eighteen-month-old son, slept deeply and, she was sure, contentedly Jamie was somewhere in between. IT WAS WHILE she was lying in bed that Isabel Dalhousie, philosopher and editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, thought about the things we do.

The Lost Art of Gratitude by Alexander McCall Smith