How doctors all too rarely think, says the noted oncologist and haematologist Jerome Groopman, is, in the words of the cliché, “outside the box.” This process starts early in the medical training cycle, he says, with medical students and junior doctors all too often failing to question cogently, listen carefully, or observe keenly.

What's partly to blame for this, Groopman contends, is today's rigid reliance on evidence based medicine and even, to an increasing extent, on highly sophisticated technology that “has taken us away from the patient's story.” To support this notion he points to the sobering statistic that between 1998 and 2002 the number of computed tomography investigations in the United States increased by 59%, magnetic resonance imaging by 51%, and ultrasonography by 50%.

But it's the sensitivity to language and emotion, he believes, that …