Thought Essays ⁽¹³⁷⁾

The title of this article is an idea Dr. Shigeaki Hinohara, the Japanese physician, kept preaching in his later years. The same profession makes me deeply agree with it. Physicians have essentially only two missions: first, to prolong the patient's life as much as possible;…

Beyond inexhaustible truth there is no authority. And of truth, on the one hand, anyone may pursue it; on the other, no one may say he possesses the final truth. — Karl Jaspers Today I saw a joke. Someone asked on Zhihu: why is it…

At every moment of life, a person is both the image of his future and the likeness of his past. — Oscar Wilde, De Profundis Every time my wife's workplace organizes a health checkup, once the results come back, several colleagues are found to have…

Over the past two years I have grown very fond of biology and often read various biological works. As I read, I increasingly feel that biology can be even more inspiring than philosophy. According to biologists, life on Earth began with single-celled organisms. Over billions…

Last night, just before bed, my younger sister asked to borrow living expenses from me. My sister is a seamstress and her husband is a renovation worker. Before the pandemic, the couple's combined monthly income was over ten thousand yuan, and in good months over…

When I was a child in the countryside, the consensus among villagers was that reading can change fate—that reading can turn us from country folk into city folk, from peasants into educated people, so that we no longer have to face the yellow earth and…

As the climate warms, scientists have observed some animals migrating toward cooler regions. Continued temperature rises are forcing animals in tropical forests to seek new homes, and their first contact with other species will greatly raise the risk that humans contract new viruses and that…

How many commercial advertisements do we encounter in a day? The oceanographer Jacques Cousteau did a fascinating experiment: between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., as he walked around Paris, he counted every ad he encountered. He said: "Whenever someone tried to sell me something I…

Recently, after the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war, two sharply different camps emerged: one supports solving problems through war, the other calls for peaceful means. Analyzed closely, those who support war hold a pessimistic view, believing things have deteriorated to the point where only war…

Should scientists and doctors care about politics? I often hear voices telling me: just study medicine and do your research well, don't get involved in politics. This remark actually reflects a peculiar, distorted value cultivated by our traditional culture, which can be elegantly phrased as:…