Summary:

A physician recounts the experience of caring for a small child with an incurable disease. The father brings in a bright stuffed dinosaur for the child and despite all expectations, the child opens one eye and reaches for the toy, then lapses back into a coma. The family and physicians cry together. A week later the child dies. The narrator uses this example to argue that it is the intensity of a physician's experiences and the privilege of being a part of them, rather than whether or not the experience is happy, that gives medicine its meaning and satisfaction.

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