[The good practice of medicine: Between scientific progress and the permanence of human essence]

Contemporary medicine evolves with unprecedented speed in its technical and scientific dimensions, while the essential traits of good clinical practice -compassion, prudence, empathy, and accompaniment- show remarkable historical persistence since the documented origins of the profession. Drawing on the author's lived experience with early goal-directed therapy for sepsis (Surviving Sepsis Campaign, 2008) and its subsequent abandonment, and inspired by Francis W. Peabody's The Care of the Patient (1927), this essay articulates a distinction between medical science -progressive and perfectible by nature- and the ethical essence of medical practice, understood not as a set of fixed pre-given traits, but as the anthropological capacity to cultivate the virtues constitutive of the clinical relationship. From that distinction it proposes a prototype of good clinical practice -following Pellegrino and Thomasma, as a normative representation of the clinician embodying the virtues proper to the moral enterprise of medicine- grounded in four cardinal virtues, contrasted with the contemporary prototype of professional ″success″ -research, dissemination, digital presence-, while acknowledging their legitimacy and tempering the critique to their hypertrophy. It discusses the dynamics that erode this core and emphasizes, drawing on educational evidence and the main international frameworks, that clinical virtues can and should be taught through structured curricula.