A Race against Time: Patient Suffering in the Clinic

Abstract: The play of patience and impatience is often powerfully active in the experiences of the clinic. The onset of an illness, the exposure to suffering, and the awareness of our mortality that it awakens compel us to negotiate and renegotiate our relationships with time and with others. Seen in this way, drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, what emerges is not a fixed value but rather a continuous axis in relation to which we valorize the complex and multifaceted ways in which we relate to the unfolding of time.