Observe, record, tabulate, communicate.
Sir William Osler
Thirty years ago, not long after I began teaching first- and second-year medical students how to take patient medical histories and perform physical examinations, it occurred to me that I was trying to teach them how to write. I came to see that taking a medical history, performing a physical examination, reviewing ancillary data like electrocardiograms, laboratory results, and imaging studies, and organizing this information into a coherent and useful document that could be recorded with a pen on paper—the now antique tools that were used at the time—is in fact a specialized form of the writing process.