My favorite preceptor makes mistakes. She’s an ob-gyn in a rural area, where a lot of her patients have made mistakes too. There’s the woman on methadone maintenance who keeps miscarrying, who worries that the pain pills she abused through her adolescence have made her body too beleaguered to bear a child. And the woman who came to the hospital after a meth binge made her bleed so much she thought she’d lost the pregnancy. My preceptor’s mistakes aren’t on the same plane as those of her patients, but she owns them just as ardently as they own theirs. “I don’t know,” she says frequently, “I’ll need to look that up. I misspoke, I was wrong, I’m sorry.”