Med schools also instill a demanding professional ethos, which stretches back thousands of years. “Doctors are taught to run into the fire and not away from it,” Kalet continues. “Today, the young doctors feel free to say, ‘I’m terrified, but I’m going to do it anyway.’ That’s courage. We’re staying. We’re a team.”

It certainly doesn’t always happen, but the professional ideal is clear, she concludes. “You can save lives. And when you can’t save lives you can be in the darkness with patients even if there is nothing to offer. You stay.”

Med schools are struggling to become more humane and less macho, more relationship-centered and less body-centered. But when you look at what’s happening across the country right now, you see the benefits of their tough training.

This week The Times Magazine ran a diary by an E.R. doctor named Helen Ouyang. To enter the E.R. with her in this crisis is to enter another world.

Normal procedures crumble under the crush of patients. A man dies unattended, sitting in a chair. A veteran physician feels stripped of his invincibility. The core of Ouyang’s diary is her acceptance that it’s impossible to do her work and still stay safe. “It seems impossible to avoid getting infected.”

Death and talk of death is everywhere. The virus seems to do whatever it wants. “We put our full minds and whole hearts into trying to save them. Then I see their bodies shut down anyway. They are alone.” Wearing the same masks for so long etches lines into her face, but she keeps going back in.

There’s absolutely no self-glorification here, just endurance. I’m reminded of Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s 1931 memoir. When hiring doctors for his hospital in the African jungle, he wrote, he never hired anyone who thought he was doing something grand and heroic. The only doctors who would last are those who thought what they were doing was as ordinary and necessary as doing the dishes: “There are no heroes of action — only heroes of renunciation and suffering.”