Put patients first

A decade ago, James Young, a genial British-born doctor, had one of the most prestigious jobs possible at an American hospital. His title was “Head of Medicine” at Cleveland Clinic, one of the biggest hospitals in the world; and since western medicine has traditionally been split into two branches—namely “medicine” and “surgery”—James was thus overseeing half the hospital.

But in 2007, James was sucked into an extraordinary experiment. Toby Cosgrove, a heart thorassic surgeon who runs Cleveland Clinic, declared that…