‘People are not things’  is a memorable mantra, sometimes attributed to the late Lord David ‘Rambo’ Ramsbotham (1934–2022), a former British army general and outspoken chief inspector of prisons. The aphorism is highly appropriate to this month’s Life &Times, set amid the strikes of nurses and paramedics, with the potential of more doctors’ strikes to come. Given some of the recent public rhetoric about GPs, I wonder if we are perceived as ‘things’, to be manufactured or bought-in and deployed where needed, as a means to cheap health care, without considering that we are also people with personal lives, families, and citizenship, or even basic human rights.

In this issue David Zigmond argues that mass-produced doctors risk becoming commodified, with work stripped of human connection and meaning. These are essential to a flourishing practice in a literal sense. Without meaning and connection, work becomes robotic, even hollow.

If we are not ‘things’, GPs might be portrayed as examples of ‘homo economicus’, or ‘economic man’, sometimes called ‘Econs’, the rational self-interested person that classical economic theory assumes we all are. ‘Econs’ naturally aim to …