An anthropolist's take on compassion in health care, here.
In his interviews on the subject he notes:
"...compassion was commonly understood as an everyday thing—not requiring drama or large effort but consisting of small acts. Over and over, when people described compassion in others, they referred not to monumental actions or events in people's lives, but to small behaviors: ways of listening and supporting others that were hard to describe because of their seeming ordinariness. At the same time, while recruiting participants for the study, I was regularly told, "Why do you want to talk to me? I'm not a compassionate person."
This suggests a conflict between compassion conceptualized as a heroic phenomenon and compassion experienced in the mundane."
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