“To believe in medicine would be the height of folly, if not to believe in it were not a greater folly still.”
– Marcel Proust
I like Alain de Botton.
In his book, How Proust can change your life, he takes up the question of whether a convinced Proustian should ever visit a doctor. The great novelist Marcel Proust was the son and brother of surgeons, and yet — or because of it– he was very suspicious of doctors. In part it was the arrogance he perceived they brought to their relationships with patients “merely” because they attended years of medical school.
He admired most those physicians who, through their own personal experience with infirmity, had opened up to a deeper appreciation of life. Suffering through physical misfortune, he thought, was the best instruction in human biological reality. Watching, and even caring for the sick, was really not quite enough.
But, as de Botton observes,”frequently, suffering fails to alchemize into ideas and, instead of affording us a better sense of reality, pushes us into a baneful direction where we learn nothing new. . .” Both Proust’s novels and the world, it seems, are filled with bad sufferers.
Now the job of medicine is ostensibly to reduce suffering, be it of the mind or the body: lessen pain, increase function. We leave it to culture, religion, our parents and whatever to teach us how to suffer. But one is still compelled to ask how should we go about the task (or for doctors, maybe the duty) of learning from our suffering?
Proust confronts us with the need to understand what kind of company does misery really need. Or better yet, what kind of doctor does suffering need? Should we be teaching our doctors how to use their own illnesses to advance their self-knowledge? Do physicians always have to be the worst patients, as the old cliche advises us?
