The patient is the endpoint of medicine’s core mission, which is to care for sick human beings. A sense that modern biomedicine has lost sight of that goal has inspired a quest for more “patient-centered” medicine over the past half century, which has contributed to the interdisciplinary field now known as the health humanities. Derived from the same Latin origins as “patience,” the word patient conveys the sense of a passive object of medical action (OED Online 2021, “patient”). Yet typically becoming a patient requires some degree of participation, first by feeling sick and then by seeking a healer. From ancient times onward, doctors recognized that some degree of patient cooperation was conducive to good medicine. Hippocrates’ Aphorisms, a text widely used in medical training through the 1800s, had as its first principle, “It is not enough for the physician to do what is necessary, but the patient and the attendant must do their part as well and the circumstances must be favorable” (Chadwick, Mann, and Lloyd 1983, 206). But what it meant for patients to do their part remained a matter for debate and negotiation. Starting in the late 1700s with the “birth of the clinic,” a new kind...