TY - JOUR T1 - Medicine, the body and an invitation to wonder JF - Medical Humanities JO - J Med Humanit SP - 97 LP - 102 DO - 10.1136/medhum-2015-010826 VL - 42 IS - 2 AU - H M Evans Y1 - 2016/06/01 UR - http://mh.bmj.com/content/42/2/97.abstract N2 - There is, I think, a resonance between being a patient and having a greater sense of wonder at things in the world around us: a sense of wonder at things that become, briefly and intermittently, intensely and newly present. As with experiences of art, or of humour, or of love, or of strong ethical motivation, in experiences of wonder it seems to me that we live more intensely. And if it is a good thing to live, then perhaps living intensely may, while it lasts, be an intensely good thing. In this paper, I will try to reflect on this resonance within my personal experience, within the context of a number of related undertakings. These are as follows: to argue that there is something enduringly and inescapably wonderful about the challenge facing the clinical medical practitioner;to disclose something personal about myself as a patient within primary care;to recognise the wonder of our embodied state;to review the importance of a sense of wonder for doctor and patient alike;to argue for a reassessment—and a reassignment—of the moral centre of gravity of clinical medicine;to consider whether an ethics grounded upon wonder is compatible with virtue ethicsto explore aspects of wonder and suggest future research;to sketch out how a sense of wonder at our mortality—our ‘finitude’—helps us all in acknowledging and responding to ‘the lives of others’.These undertakings cumulatively constitute the ‘invitation to wonder’ that I would like to issue.In medical practice, where the existential as well as the material grounds of patients’ experiences of health, illness, disability and mortality are equally prominent and equally precious, clinicians have a characteristic form of contact with their patients that, to me as a layman and as a patient, seems to be both an unparalleled richness and a … ER -