The Virtue of Hope in Medical Training

Abstract

While many of the challenges of contemporary medical training are characterized uniformly as “burnout,” such a diagnosis is nonspecific and overlooks the degree to which the flourishing of medical practitioners depends on the development and exercise of virtue. The virtue of hope, in particular, is indispensable to sound medical practice generally and the flourishing of trainees. It is only through sound apprehension of the nature of the virtue of hope, the challenges to the cultivation of hope that residency poses, and practices that allow such cultivation, that contemporary trainees can learn to care well for patients and flourish in their own right. Summary: While the general term “burnout” is used to describe many of the challenges of contemporary medical training, a more precise characterization that unifies these challenges is a deficiency of the virtue of hope. Medical trainees face many obstacles to the cultivation of hope during training, but learning both to correctly identify this deficiency, and practices which prove a fitting response, offers a way forward.