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I was struck by the headline of associate foreign editor Li Xueying’s article, “ ” (March 26). I’m a semi-retired paediatrician, and emeritus consultant in a hospital. I’ve been concerned about what I’ve observed in medical students and young doctors in Singapore, and gave a talk some time ago entitled, “The art of medicine – what has love got to do with it?”. It seems both Ms Li and I are concerned about love – she, about the lovableness of our city; me, about the role of love in medical care. You may also suspect that we wrote about “love” because we sense a lack of it – in the city, and in medical care. What is good medical care? It’s obvious to everyone that a good doctor should be knowledgeable about his area of expertise. I can say honestly that our medical schools produce some of the brightest young doctors in the world. But I also sense that something is lacking – the human touch. I suspect that many doctors’ understanding of excellence stops short at technical expertise, that many of them may not see that patients need and even desire something beyond that – a human connection that is intangible, not measurable in key performance indicators. Maybe we should be reminded of an observation that Sir William Osler, a pioneer in the field of clinical medical education, made: “The good physician treats the disease, the great physician treats the patient with the disease”. Patients, with their anxieties and fears, often need the art of a “healer” more than the medicine dispensed by the doctor. They can sense whether their physicians genuinely care for them, even love them, or are just dispensing their technical skills.