The Foundation of the Physician's Calling Lies in a Kind Heart

Thirty years ago, when I was still a child, two elderly doctors in our village treated everyone there; by kinship they were both my great-uncles. These two kinsmen of mine were skilled in tuina bone-setting, acupuncture and moxibustion, massage, and certain TCM external therapies. Every evening their home would have patients coming for treatment. They treated the patients wholeheartedly and charged nothing, but on festivals and holidays the patients they had treated would bring big bags of gifts to thank them.

For a long time I took this heartfelt, friendly relationship between doctor and patient as something entirely natural. But after Chinese society began to worship money, such a friendly doctor-patient relationship disappeared; in its place, medical institutions and doctors calculated the patient's wallet, while patients constantly questioned and resented hospitals and doctors.

Yet I believe this trend will not last, because medicine is, in the end, a special kind of service. The physician's mission is to save the dying and heal the wounded; medicine is a profession that helps the vulnerable sick. The present doctor-patient relationship is not normal. Things that reach an extreme turn back; if medicine has been off the normal track for too long, it will eventually return to normal under the pressure of society.

I often regret that I was too young back then to study medicine under these two kinsmen, and so failed to learn their art. But the kind-hearted style they left behind has constantly influenced me. That way of always smiling at the sick, listening to patients' troubles without weariness, and striving to resolve their suffering, is deeply engraved in my mind.

With such two doctors in the village, word of mouth spread through the in-law network, and villagers from near and far came to them. My aunt's ganglion cyst was cured by my kinsman with one very long, thin silver needle plus a chopstick while she was visiting our family. The whole treatment took only an hour or two, and her ganglion cyst never recurred. But I myself, not being a surgeon, had my own hand ganglion cyst treated by several doctors and operated on several times, yet it was never cured at the root.

Some of today's doctors and medical institutions spend lavishly on advertising to attract patients, and once a patient is drawn in, they try every means to exploit him. Yet the influence they build falls far short of the word-of-mouth reach my kinsman enjoyed. The root cause, I think, is that today's medical profession has abandoned the essential for the superficial and has lost the trust of patients. This cannot but be called a sorrow for the medical community as a whole.