“Doctors and nurses, accustomed to touching the misery of mankind, walk around giving prescriptions, advice, lavishing tenderness and understanding. They are capable of combining the kind of love they profess for humanity with a kind of distance that protects them from the contagion of the pain of others. However, they are anguished, they suffer, they become attached to their patients, with whom they sometimes establish a true relationship of friendship.
These are the words of the painter Emma Cano, who is exhibiting at the Royal National Academy of Medicine a masterly display of her specialised work on the doctor-patient relationship and the human condition.