Kate Gompert in the psych ward (p. 74)
the doctor, who’d had all discomfort at being stared at by patients trained right out of him when he’d rotated through the paralysis/-plegia wards upstairs, was able to look directly back at her with a kind of bland compassion, the expression of someone who was compassionate but was not, of course, feeling what she was feeling, and who honored her subjective feelings by not even trying to pretend that he was.
Context
The theme surfacing as training: the paralysis/-plegia wards are where doctors go to have "all discomfort at being stared at" — the flinch before damaged bodies — conditioned out of them; the clinical gaze at disability, repurposed for the suicidal.