What Chinese Medicine Most Lacks Is the Spirit of Humanistic Care
I have an ideal that, when spoken aloud, makes many people laugh: I hope to found in China a clinic like the Mayo Clinic in America. Starting from the faintest beginnings, built through the efforts of several generations, it would one day become a true moral benchmark and a sacred place of healing for China's medical profession. To this end, the moment my son turned ten, I began teaching him medicine, while warning him that he must become a good doctor, clinging to idealism, humanitarianism, and the spirit of humanistic care. If I have more children in the future, I will likewise raise them from childhood to study medicine and rescue the dying. I hope that, through this passing of the torch, my ideal may be realized through generations of effort as unyielding as the Foolish Old Man who moved the mountains.
I do not envy wealth-creating heroes like Jack Ma and Robin Li. Their restlessness and their hunger for quick success are no different from those of the great majority in this age. Their enterprises cannot uphold the moral principles that a genuine enterprise ought to uphold; they lack social responsibility, and beyond the wealth they have created, they have brought upon society a long-lasting and pernicious influence. One could say that many of today's entrepreneurs are setting the whole society a bad example.
What kind of place is the Mayo Clinic in the United States? It is a clinic founded in 1864. A doctor named Mayo, seeking to treat the wounded of the American Civil War, established the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The Mayo Clinic is a not-for-profit medical institution, and Dr. Mayo's lifelong wish was truly to save lives. Mayo's two sons, William Mayo and William James Mayo, both followed in their father's footsteps, carrying forward his spirit of healing and continuing to run the Mayo Clinic. The salvation-minded dedication of two generations of the Mayo family produced the Mayo Clinic of today. Now the Mayo Clinic has become the world's most famous general hospital, a global holy place of medicine.
In my view, the medical enterprise can only be done well on the basis of holding fast to values while developing over the long term. China today is restlessness incarnate. Many business people pouring into healthcare wildly clamor that they will build, in a mere decade or so, the most powerful general hospital in the world. Such utterly unrealistic delusions will only further worsen the state of Chinese medicine.
I once spent a few months in management at a private hospital that was not part of the Putian network. At the time I wrote a proposal in which I hoped to turn that hospital into one with conscience and feeling. Unfortunately, that enthusiasm was ultimately defeated by reality. What the investors urgently needed was economic returns, not social benefits. So in the end, when I found that this medical institution had begun down the road of Baidu paid bidding, I left it.
After that I did not want to work in any hospital; I only wanted, through my own unremitting effort, to open the ideal hospital of my dreams—one whose true mission is to save lives, and whose joy lies in serving patients and benefiting the people. I have always believed that such a hospital, once opened, would not starve its doctors and nurses, even if it would not make them rich. From my many years of dealing with patients, as long as a doctor wholeheartedly puts the patient first, patients will not retaliate against or harm the doctor; on the contrary, they will be grateful and will never treat the doctor shabbily.
For a time I was keen on fighting fraud in the medical profession, but an individual's efforts to expose fraud achieve very little and waste enormous time, so later I buried myself in my study and devoted myself entirely to studying medicine. In recent years, a series of public incidents in the medical world have at last, again and again, ignited public anger, laying bare all that is false, evil, and ugly within the profession. Some of the business people who have wormed their way into Chinese medicine deserve nothing less than to be humanely exterminated—especially the investors of those Putian-affiliated private hospitals that murder for profit.
But would destroying these people make Chinese medicine turn from evil to good? Absolutely not. Kill off one group of Putian people, and another group will rise up, marching boldly onward along the road of murder for profit, cheating and swindling among patients. The reason is none other than this: our society as a whole universally lacks the spirit of humanistic care, and so it produces a great many people who chase profit at any cost and harm others to benefit themselves.
China's intellectuals have collectively degenerated; they no longer possess the spirit of "shouldering moral duty with iron shoulders." Few can sit quietly on the cold bench, genuinely holding themselves to the standard of "learning to be a teacher of others, conduct to be a model for the age." The moral decay of Chinese society has thus reached an appalling degree. The souls of our people have universally sunk in a whirlwind of material worship; in such an environment, growing a pure medical institution is exceedingly difficult.
I do not know how long I will live, nor whether my ideal will ever be realized. In real life I am mocked by many as a simple, foolish fellow, and I hold myself to a very high standard. Some may take me for a megalomaniac or a narcissist. I have always believed that, given time, I can achieve work that will serve as a model for later ages and help transform the manners of society.
In my life I have done some unethical things, but nothing of gross villainy. I have a sense of "who else but me?" courage: willing to sacrifice myself, willing to sit on the cold bench, willing to spend a lifetime—not three or five years—on the work of saving lives, willing to give myself up for others in the spirit of laying down one's life for righteousness, and able to endure poverty and loneliness. I am willing to build in China a medical institution like the Mayo Clinic, one truly centered on humanitarian values.
I personally believe that doctors ought to be the most compassionate people in the world—indeed, far more compassionate than religious believers who offer words without substance. Our ancients often said that a physician has the heart of a parent; a doctor must possess benevolent heart and skill. The doctor is also society's last line of moral defense; if even the doctor's moral bottom line cannot be held, society has sunk beyond imagining. For the medical profession faces human suffering every day, and a doctor without compassion will never, from the heart, respect the lives of patients.
If a doctor studies and practices medicine with the mindset that "healing one patient is like healing my own mother, and wronging one patient is like wronging my own father," then whether in moral conduct or in skill, he is bound to become a physician whom patients can trust, and to whom society and the people can entrust their lives. And this is precisely the spirit that is now so widely lacking in our country's medical profession.
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