Clinical forethought refers to the habits of thought that allow clinicians to anticipate likely clinical eventualities and to take the actions warranted. Clinical forethought requires prior experiential learning with similar patient care situations. It also requires clinical imagination. Effective clinical forethought requires the best scientific understandings of a particular patient problem and clinical wisdom gained through experience. Learning to think-in-action in any practice medicine, law, nursing, teaching, or social work is based on learning prototypical situations and then filling out these prototypes with actual clinical experience so that the prototypical cases become more nuanced and particularized in specific patient encounters. The nurse with a good map of the patient’s vulnerabilities, such as co-morbid conditions like diabetes, is in a better position to locate the risks and thereby anticipate and prevent problems for particular patients.