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Today's Doctor: Physician or Technician?
| Article
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17067 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1990 |
5,933 Words |
| Author
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Walter W. Benjamin
Walter W. Benjamin is professor of religion and applied ethics
at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. |
As Ivan Ilych lies dying, Tolstoy describes how his physician punctiliously orders special foods, prods, sounds, auscultates, and otherwise "performs various gymnastic movements over him with a significant expression on his face" - all of it adding to Ilych's agony, which is relieved only by his servant's simple act of holding up his legs. But as Tolstoy shrewdly observes, "the doctor had adopted a certain relation to his patient which he could not abandon."
Physicians of whatever era have always developed a professional persona that separated them from their patients. But with the exponential growth of technology beginning about forty years ago, that alienation began to increase significantly. I feel fortunate, therefore, to have childhood memories of my father, a rural physician from the 1930s and 40s.
Father practiced medicine for almost five decades in a small county seat town of five thousand in southwestern-Minnesota. His life began in the horse-and-buggy era, 1894, and ended in 1985, almost two decades after man had walked on the moon. A solo practitioner, he exerted a paternal persona. I often rode with him on farm house calls. Sometimes, the rain, mud, or snow would get us stuck or the car would slide into a ditch. He would bundle me up in a blanket and then walk to the nearest home to get a farmer and team of horses to drag us free.
When he entered the kitchen, faces that revealed a Dutch, Scandinavian, or German origin would light up in appreciation. It seemed as if, to them, the title M.D. meant Minor Deity. After a serious conversation and examination of the patient in the bedroom, he would open his black bag. There were glass vials of pills of various colors, shapes, and odors. As a child I wondered at their magical efficacy. He would shake them into little paper enveloped and write out the dosage. The visit ended at the door with a heartfelt, "Thanks so much for coming, Doc."
My father lived the simple life induced by the Depression era. He knew the straitened circumstances of his patients. Some paid their bills in produce, chickens, quarters of beef, and sides of hogs. An ingrained asceticism and the Puritan ethic necessitated that he drive a Ford. Intuitively, he knew that a more affluent life-style would drive a wedge between the healer and the sick, destroying his effectiveness. He laboriously wrote patient records out in longhand on 8- by 6-inch cards. Social diseases where noted in code lest his records fall into the hands of an
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