As a youth growing up in small town America in the 1960s, I remember how physicians were seen as scientists. They seemed to take it as part of their work to walk patients through the reasoning that comes with scientific method. I experienced it enough myself and heard it described by others, so that when at age 13 I first met a physician socially (a heart-and-lung surgeon father of some new friends), I asked him about it. He confirmed to me that it was understood among physicians that their calling included the duty of being missionaries of science into the heartland of America, and that in medical schools in the 1940's and 1950's and 1960's it had been part of the education that they brought science to society through medicine.

The surgeon had a couple sons who kayaked, as did my brothers (and, weakly, I). Occasionally we skied as families as well, an one day in their ski condo in Stratton, Vermont after skiiing, their neighbors dropped by. One man introduced himself as "Dr." so and so. He was quizzed, and it turned out he was a professor of history in a college in Vermont. When the introductions reached the surgeon he said his name and then, "I'm a real doctor not a PhD." I knew what he meant and it stuck in my mind. It did not seem out of place, either, to me at 10, for a physician to be somewhat imperious towards others in that way.