Licence my roving hands, and let them go, Before, behind, between, above, below.

Not merely do the practitioners, by virtue of gaining admission to the charmed circle of colleagues, individually exercise the license to do things others do not do, but collectively they presume to tell society what is good and right for the individual and for society at large in some aspect of life. Indeed, they set the very terms in which people may think about this aspect of life. The medical profession, for instance, is not content merely to define the terms of medical practice. It also tries to define for all of us the very nature of health and disease. When the presumption of a group to a broad mandate of this kind is explicitly or implicitly granted as legitimate, a profession has come into being.

Although defining a person as a technical object is necessary in order for medical activities to proceed, it constitutes an indignity in itself. This indignity can be cancelled or at least qualified by simultaneously acknowledging the patient as a person.