The following passage is from one of the greatest books that was ever written – titled WAR AND PEACE by Leo Tolstoy, published by Penguin Classics, translated from Russian by Rosemary Edmonds – first published in 1957. What Tolstoy has written about doctors is unique holds true even today!
“Doctors come to see the patient, both singly and in consultation, talks endlessly in French, German and Latin criticize one another and prescribe every sort of remedy to cure every complaint they had ever heard of.
“It never occurred to one of them to make the simple reflection that the disease could not be known to them; just as no complaint afflicting a living being can ever be entirely familiar. It is due to the fact that each living being has his own individual peculiarities. Whatever the disease is, it must be necessarily peculiar to each patient. It is a new and complex malady unknown to medicine – not a disease of the lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves and so on, as described in the medical books, but a disease consisting of one out of the innumerable combinations of the ailments of those organs.
This simple reflection could not occur to the doctors (any more than it could ever occur to a sorcerer that he is unable to produce magic) because medicine was their life-work; because it was for that they were paid and on that they had expended the best years of their lives. But the chief reason why this reflection could never enter their heads was because they saw that they were unquestionably useful.
Their usefulness did not depend on making the patient swallow substances, for the most part harmful (the harm was scarcely appreciable because they were administered in such small doses). They were useful, necessary and indispensable because they satisfied a moral need of the sick and those who loved the sick man. That is why they are and always will be pseudo healers, wise women, homeopaths and allopaths. The doctors satisfied the eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathetic action, which is felt in the presence of the suffering.
The need is seen in its most elementary form in the child which must have the bruised place rubbed to make it better. A child hurts itself and at once runs to the arms of mother or nurse to have the bad place kissed rubbed and feels better as soon as it is done. The child cannot believe that these people who are so much stronger and cleverer have no remedy for its pain. The hope of relief and the expression of its mother’s sympathy while she rubs the bump comforts it. The doctors were of service because they kissed and rubbed the bad place, assuring that the trouble would soon be over if the car driver drove down to the chemist’s shop and got a powder and some pills in a pretty box for Rs.1500/- and if the patient took those powders in boiled water at intervals of precisely two hours. Neither more nor less.
What would have become of the family who had nothing to do but to look at their sick family member, weak, and fading away – if there had not been those pills to give by the clock, the warm drinks to prepare, the chicken cutlets, and all other details ordered by the doctors, which supplied occupation and consolation to all of them? The stricter and more complicated the doctor’s orders, the more comfort did those around find in carrying them out.
How could the father have borne his beloved daughter’s illness had he not known that it was costing him dearly, and he would not grudge to spend more if that would do her any good; or had he not known that if her illness continued, he would find still further money to take her abroad and consultations, and had he not been able to tell people how experts had not understood the symptoms but a relatively new doctor diagnosed them? What would the mother have done had she not been able every now and then to scold the sick person for not obeying the doctor’s instructions to the letter?
About the Author
Dr. K. Raja Gopal Reddy is a seasoned internationally qualified Insurance professional.
What you are reading here, may not answer all the questions we have, but has the absolute power of asking unsettling questions which increase the interest in the strange world, and show the contradictory wonders lying just below the surface of the commonest things of life. Look at this disturbing but beautiful thought of Friedrich Nietzsche “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him”.
Dr. Reddy can be reached at: raja66gopal@gmail.com
