Back in high school, I spent a summer working as an orderly in the recovery and operating rooms of Forsyth Memorial Hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. On my first day on the job, I watched a certain Dr. Norfleet performing a nephrectomy on a patient. Later that evening, I told my father, a family physician, about the experience. “Ah, Dr. Norfleet,” he said. “A gentleman of the old school.” The admiration in Dad’s voice intrigued me. Unfamiliar with that expression as a teenager—“gentleman of the old school”—I have since occasionally applied the “old school” appellation both to men and to women I’ve met. Though I can’t specifically define my parameters for forming such a judgment, it seems to me that the title refers to someone with manners and virtues associated more with the past than with the present, someone who cultivates a refinement that seems absent from modern life, someone …