2013 Community Clinician of the Year Award Winner - Charles River District
Joseph Conrad wrote: "My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel- it is, before all, to make you see. That - and no more, and it is everything.”
Conrad's task is what most writers set out to accomplish. What is the task of a physician, I wonder.
I venture to say it is the opposite of Conrad's task. The physician's task is to listen and to hear; to palpate and to feel; to look and to see; to think and to conclude; to gain trust and to be humble. Perhaps most of all, to never assume the role of healer.
This is my reflection, my attempt to provide some articulation of our profession, after over 30 years of practice. Along the way I learned from many.
My first grade teacher, who advised me not to skip to second grade, though I might have been ready and could have managed it. He said to me: “Patience in learning is essential for retaining knowledge.”
My sports' coach in middle school, who said to me: “For an accurate shot at the basket, it is not enough to simply position your hands and the ball, but rather, your whole body must assume the shooting position, and you had better be aware of where your opponent is!”
My anatomy professor, speaking to us while we gathered around a cadaver in our first year in medical school, he said: “You should know that you are not embarking on a voyage of mere professional advancement or career development. Medicine is a devotion, a calling; it is like the priesthood. Your patient's interest comes before yours or anyone else’s.”
I also learned a lot from my readings, and learned that medicine and society, as they interact, are the same no matter how far back in history we go. Listen to Hippocrates telling us what Medicine is: "Life is short; art is long."
And let us read John Donne writing in the 16th century: "We study health, and we celebrate upon our meats and drink and air and exercises, and we hew and we polish every stone that goes to the building; and so our health is a long and regular work."
Maintaining health and preventing disease, these are still goals we do not come close to achieving. Medicine is an art form still developing. It is a life long endeavor for each physician, and a never-ending project for humankind.
There are so many medical questions left to answer, so much still unknown. Yet we debate proven things, from diet and obesity to vaccination and disease control. Is public health, I wonder, a matter of personal choice and freedom? John Donne knew the answer long ago: "No man is an island," he wrote. Indeed, refusal of vaccination allows germs to spread and epidemics to continue. In Pakistan and Afghanistan today, the instrumentalization of vaccine programs as a weapon of war has prevented eradication of polio—an otherwise fully achievable goal. In a recent article in Harper's Magazine, Eula Biss reminds us of the interconnectedness of individuals, the universality of human life, and the public-ness of public health.
Speaking about the benefits of universal vaccination, Biss says:
The boundaries between our bodies begin to dissolve here. Blood and organs move between us, exiting one body and entering another, and so, too, with immunity, which is a common trust as much as it is a private account. Those of us who draw on collective immunity owe our health to our neighbors.
As physicians, in treating individual patients we are serving society as a whole. It is important for us to practice and continue to develop medicine with the collective in mind.
I am a physician and I am involved in mankind. And though he didn't say it about medicine, John Donne certainly could have: "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee…"
Mohammad G. Reda, M.D.
