Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

Recommended by Vishal Patel, Harvard Medical School clinical fellow in surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital

I came to medicine by way of philosophy of science, so I am partial to old questions asked well. Edith Hall asks the oldest one: What makes a life go well? Her answer, drawn from Aristotle, is not a feeling but a practice. Eudaimonia — usually flattened into “happiness” — is something you do, the full use of your powers along lines of excellence. You become good by doing good things, until the doing becomes habit. That reframing has stayed with me on the wards. A residency is built from thousands of small, unglamorous acts repeated until they are second nature, and Aristotle’s claim is that character is forged exactly there, in the repetition, not in the grand gesture. I find that both demanding and reassuring. The virtues he prizes — practical wisdom, the golden mean between extremes, the habit of consulting others before a hard decision — read less like ancient ethics than like a quiet description of good clinical judgment. What I most admire is Hall’s refusal to make this easy. Flourishing is available to nearly everyone, she insists, but only to those who decide to work at it. As a researcher I spend my days asking what interventions actually change outcomes; here is one, 23 centuries old, that asks me to be the intervention. I read it slowly, a few pages at a time, and keep coming back.