Philosophy of general practice: in the eye of the beholder.

‘The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If something were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing and life would not be worth living. I am not speaking of course of that beauty which strikes the senses, of the beauty of qualities and appearances. I am far from despising this, but it has nothing to do with science. What I mean is that more intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp ... Intellectual beauty, on the contrary, is self-sufficing and it is for it, more perhaps than the future good of humanity, that the scientist condemns himself to long and painful labours.’ 1 Much of science has developed in this way, reducing disease and other phenomena to their component parts, but this is not the way of general practice and primary care. While scientists break things down, practitioners construct. One of the privileges of general practice and family medicine is the opportunity to look after a whole population, whether geographically defined, or a list of people accessing health care at a particular place: