...What is the job of a physician? No one put it more succinctly than the founder of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, who open his most fundamental treatise with, “The physician’s highest and only calling is to make the sick healthy, to cure, as it is called.”1 and that, “the highest ideal of cure is the rapid, gentle and permanent restoration of health…”2

But when cure is no longer possible and the physical life of an individual is playing itself out, the physician’s role necessarily changes dramatically. Clearly, one of his or her chief functions is to administer comfort. This can extend far beyond prescription of analgesics such as morphine and attending to other bodily needs.