The “healer’s hand” is a famous ancient symbol associated with the shaman’s touch that heals the sick.

My doctor of the last 15 years is a true healer, and also the author of a well-known Vermont book: Bag Balm and Duct Tape, Tales of a Vermont Doctor (1989).

It’s the story of a young city-trained doctor who came to Vermont and how his country patients in a town the author calls “Dumster” taught him to be the kind of countrified doctor they were used to, and wanted to keep around.

His real name is Beach Conger, and he’s about to turn 77 this year. He retired three years ago from Mt. Ascutney Hospital and Health Center in Windsor, but he kept a second practice in Burlington where he lives.

I asked if I could follow him there, even though it’s an hour and a half drive, and he said yes.

I didn’t want to lose a doctor who speaks in down-to-earth images. Bag balm and duct tape are just the kind of medicine I understand. But the larger lesson in Conger’s book is that a good doctor in many ways becomes the doctor his patients teach him to be. Even at in his 70s, Dr. Conger keep this lesson fresh.

I communicate with him through emails between our semiannual visits, and he has willingly obliged me as a digital doctor, often saving me a drive to Burlington by dashing off reassurance or an admonition.

In the last five years, there have been two other digital doctors in my life.

One is 59 and a cardiologist. He is amazingly responsive to email questions and always answers within 24 hours, even though he is head of his department, in other words, a big shot.

He, like the semi-fictional doctor in Bag Balm and Duct Tape, is letting his patients teach him what they want in a doctor, and digital interaction is definitely part of a modern patient’s expectations. When I first went to him a dozen years ago, email communication was not part of his repertoire. (Not that I’m a “modern” patient at age 72, but I am a digital enthusiast).

The second digital doctor just got his M.D. degree two years ago. He is definitely a member of the digital generation.

He lives next door to me in Hartford Village, and even though he has not been my official doctor, he was coincidentally on duty in the emergency room a couple of years ago when I walked in having a heart attack.

He and I already had a digital relationship as neighbors, because his dog kept escaping his electric fence. I would text him at work that the dog was loose and I was bringing him home.

Back to the heart attack. The ER folks put me on a gurney with an intravenous drip and hooked me up to electrical patches to monitor my heart.

There I was, in a tiny room behind a curtain at 4 a.m., text messaging a woman friend. All of a sudden, my neighbor doctor stuck his head through the curtain and said, “What are you doing here, Paul?”

“Having a heart attack, I think,” I replied.

Although he wasn’t assigned to my case, he told me “I’m on duty all day so text me and let me know how you are doing.”

I texted him throughout the day, even when I had a stent inserted surgically, and his digital hand-holding cheered me enormously, especially since he was a doctor and knew exactly what was happening to my body.

In three different ways these doctors from three different generations, Dr. Bag Balm, Dr. Cardiac and Dr. Neighbor, all represent a new kind of medical hand-holding: pressing the flesh through a keyboard, a 21st century kind of healer’s hand.

Paul Keane lives in Hartford.