I Watched the Video of Dr. Yang's Murder While Weeping, Trembling All Over

The video of Dr. Yang's murder at the Civil Aviation General Hospital has surfaced, and a note written by a colleague of Dr. Yang has surfaced too. Seeing this video and this note, I wept uncontrollably.

I have not cried this bitterly in a very long time.

I believe that, weeping as I do, there are many other doctors.

After I stopped crying, my doctor's dream lay shattered—that dream that once filled me with passion, shattered before this cruel, bloody reality.

I know that the overwhelming majority of my patients are good people, but I do not know whether, after 9,999 good patients, the 10,000th person I meet might be someone so brutal and deranged.

I do not want the next person to fall in a pool of blood to be me, nor do I want the next person to fall in a pool of blood to be my student.

I will still teach my students medical knowledge—after all, it can help them live healthier lives—but I am not so keen that they go into medicine. I will still keep enriching my own medical knowledge, because it can spare me and my relatives and friends some suffering. I will continue on the path of medical popularization, working to raise public understanding of medicine.

But on the question of whether I myself continue to practice, and whether my students should practice, I have hesitated. On the question of whether to go to medical school again, I have also hesitated.

In this extreme age, in an age when so many people cheer Dr. Yang's murder, I recall a saying of Lu Xun: "A people of ignorant souls, however sound and strong their physique, can only serve as meaningless specimens displayed to the crowd and onlookers; it is no misfortune however many of them die of disease. Therefore our foremost task is to change their spirit." To the deranged and cold-hearted, I can hold no other attitude.

I have seen hatred and coldness, and I have seen the unacceptable face of medical institutions that have been severely marketized. Doctors are caught between hospital and patient, damned either way—this is the state of Chinese medicine. Those who enter medicine brimming with passion eventually cannot help being deeply disappointed by it.

Where the true crux of this social problem lies, all 1.4 billion people know full well, and the crux itself knows full well. It is just that the rot has set in too deep to be reversed, and 1.4 billion people lack the power to change the status quo. The highest physician governs the nation; our country truly lacks such a physician.

Mencius said, "The superior man does not stand beneath a crumbling wall." China's millions of doctors stand trembling beneath crumbling walls, trembling as they safeguard the health of 1.4 billion citizens. Medical-school admission scores keep falling, because fewer and fewer students are willing to apply.

Perhaps dawn is not far off, because the night is truly dark now.