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HERO DOCTORS
ON THURSDAY evenings, the applause for NHS workers now reverberates all around my tight-knit London neighbourhood. Similar scenes are happening across the world; I believe self-isolating Spaniards were the first to holler their appreciation for hard-working health workers.
The first known hero of this dire pandemic was Chinese doctor Li Wenliang, who as early as last December sought to warn medical colleagues of a new SARS-like infection emerging in Wuhan.
Despite being detained and reprimanded by the authorities for spreading ‘false rumours’, he persevered, filming his own illness before it took his life, too. If Nobel Prizes were awarded posthumously, he would surely be deserving.
Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil was partly inspired by his own medical studies at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. In it, flighty socialite Kitty Garstin, believing she has left it too late to marry, weds Walter Fane, a doctor and bacteriologist she finds ‘odd’ and does not love. The newlyweds travel to Hong Kong and she begins an affair.
When that blows up in her face, Kitty is forced to accompany Walter to mainland China, where cholera has broken out. This becomes a brutal journey of self-revelation as each person Kitty meets expresses their admiration for the selfless husband she has treated so badly. Rebecca Abrams’ Touching Distance is historical fiction based on the true story of Scottish Enlightenment doctor Alexander Gordon, whose efforts to contain two epidemics of puerperal sepsis in Aberdeen alienated him from his colleagues. Today his is regarded as a pioneering medical mind.
The latter is what Tertius Lydgate dreams of being in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. But his ideas on sanitation and treatments are resisted by conservative elements; he never becomes the pioneering physician he might have been.
The cautionary phrase ‘First, do no harm’ is ascribed to the father of medicine, Hippocrates. We must all now do our bit to support medical workers, not least by staying home.