Robert Arnold Johnson is a physician (M.D., University of Washington School of Medicine, 1969) whose career has spanned two epochs of specialty over a nearly half-century: internal medicine and cardiology (1969-2001) and psychiatry (2004-2018). It has included teaching and research (Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston; Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, Philadelphia), and private practice in Boston and in a small city in Washington State, Walla Walla, the state in which he grew up-east of the Cascades, a decidedly rural world. He is the author of more than forty medically related publications, and he co-edited The Practice of Cardiology, a popular textbook of the 1980s. He is currently busy with a philosophical work on the nature of identity and its implications for medical care with a co-author, the philosopher Thomas Alderson Davis.