'But First and Foremost, He was Human'

Some years ago I was seeing a Syrian-born cardiologist whose parents were still in Damascus as the country’s civil war was warming up. In this context, “civil war” is a journalistic euphemism for industrial-scale slaughter. I’d never met a doctor quite like him. Seemingly unconcerned with the pressure of waiting patients, he sat across from me in the examination room and talked, and only briefly about my coronary concerns. We started with his country’s fate, Bashar al-Assad and the Ba’ath Party. At some point I mentioned the allusion in Othello to Aleppo, which is when I learned my doctor was a serious amateur Shakespearean. He regularly attended productions of the plays and – this is the part that impressed me – periodically rereads them. We swapped tags and lingered on Macbeth, the briefest of the tragedies and second-bloodiest of the plays. Less than a year later he moved to another hospital, outside my insurance plan, and I haven’t seen him since and have no idea what has happened to his parents. I thought of him again while reading Theodore Dalrymple’s “A Letter to an Aspiring Doctor”:

“A doctor should be an educated man in a broader sense than just medicine, albeit that, with so much to learn and keep up with, this is increasingly difficult. You should read at least a little philosophy, some of the history of medicine, and as much literature as possible. If there is one author I would recommend to you, it is Chekhov, himself a doctor. He managed to reconcile tolerance, understanding, humor, compassion, anger at injustice, and maintenance of high personal moral standards without permitting any of them to distort his character.”

With a few edits, Dalrymple (Dr. Anthony Daniels) could be writing to and about any of us, doctors or otherwise. He is working in the Johnsonian moral tradition:

“Whatever your inner state of turmoil when confronted by the immense showcase of human folly or unpleasantness, you must retain your outer equanimity, which does not come naturally and at first will take a mental toll on you. But habit will become character, and eventually you will learn to accept people as they are—even if they don’t deserve it.”

Dalrymple’s citing of Chekhov is fitting. If writers were to have a patron saint, I would nominate the Russian physician. The other contender for the title was also a doctor dead too young from tuberculosis: John Keats. Included in Memories of Chekhov (trans., ed. Peter Sekirin, McFarland and Co., 2011) is a remembrance of Chekhov by Odessa-born Dr. Grigory Rossolimo, who met Chekhov at Moscow University in 1879, when both were first-year medical students and Chekhov was already writing stories. Rossolimo writes: “After his graduation from medical school, he did not quit medicine, but worked as a country doctor. He treated his patients with great care and softness; he was a doctor, but first and foremost, he was human.”