I've worked with doctors who range from a dermatologist, who told me frankly that he'd picked his specialty so he'd have enough spare time to make wine, to a jolly surgeon, who really seemed to love people, even though most of his patients were under anesthesia.

I know a pediatrician who had five children of his own but was a terrible parent and an obstetrician who delivered literally thousands of babies but seemed to have absolutely no rapport with women.

In short, I've known all kinds of doctors, and the only thing I can truly say about them is that they are vastly different. And that they're different from you and me—and they aren't.

For they also have one thing in common, something neither you nor I have. Just what that is is a mystery, but if you don't have it you can't be a doctor, or at least you can't be a good doctor.

It's a common denominator, a quality, a hidden something that makes doctors able to spend their lives dealing with sick people and liking it. You could call it empathy, but it's something more than that. It's inherent in being a doctor.

And being a doctor is a strange occupation. If you are a true doctor, your patients come first, sometimes even before your family. If you're a real doctor, you are always willing to help, even if you know that help isn't always going to be successful.

For what doctors do isn't so much saving lives as it is helping people. Most doctors don't even deal with death as much as we might think they do, but they have to be ready to at any time.

Most of the time doctors don't keep people from dying. Medicine doesn't so much prevent illness as it staves it off. It delays or postpones the inevitability of death and disease.

As a doctor once told me, "It isn't that one in 10 survives. No one ultimately survives. It's that we can delay that process."

But doctors and medical care do ease suffering and pain. They do make living life easier. Sometimes they do it with drugs, sometimes with surgery. Sometimes they do it simply with assurance. The doctor seems to know what's wrong with you and that's a great help.

The chances are he or she may not, but it's the assurance that he or she seems to or that he or she will find a way to make you feel better that makes you actually improve.

How doctors do this also is a mystery. I think it is both a part of the inner core of those who become doctors and an acquired and even an enviable ability.

In my admiration for physicians, there was a time when I was much younger when I thought I'd like to be one myself. Even though it was late in life for such a decision—because most doctors know they want to be doctors when they are young—I looked into the possibility of going to medical school. I soon abandoned the idea.

It wasn't that I didn't have the wherewithal. The simple fact was that I didn't have that indefinable quality I would need if I were to make it to a medical degree. For lack of a better way of expressing it, let's say I found I simply didn't have the guts.

Because there is only one real way to learn how to be a doctor: by practicing to be one. And that isn't easy, and it simply isn't possible for everyone.

Medical education is based on the premise that older doctors teach younger ones the techniques of medicine. They've been doing it since the time of Hippocrates, the Greek usually honored as the founder of medicine, because he is supposed to have written the Hippocratic Oath, the pledge all doctors take upon entering the profession.

And, as the cliché goes, practice makes perfect. The long and rigorous hour after hour, day after day, week after week business of learning to be a doctor weeds out those who are unable to stand the physical and mental test of medical school, internship and residency.

You simply do it or you don't. No one has yet found a better process for making doctors.

And yet, why do men and women continue to go through this? Why do they suffer sleep deprivation, the sights and sounds of disease and suffering, the single-minded striving toward a single goal, the right to add permanently after their names the letters "M" and "D"?

I don't know, and I think probably they don't either. But thank God that they're still willing to do so.