[[1000 Cope Like a Cardiac Surgeon]] # A Calling for Medicine Humanity. History can only be correctly viewed through a tragic lens. Mankind is born fallen, driven by basic needs at the core, an animal with superior craftiness to the other species on the planet. Morality is a thin veneer on a miles-deep core of brutality, something that developed in the last five minutes of the last one hundred millenia. The evolutionary jump from the survival advantage of caring for your family members to concern for the one hundred or so members of your tribe to the capacity to feel sympathy for a complete stranger is like an acceleration to faster-than-light travel. The fact that souls as corrupt as ours can generate music, gain a comprehension of mathematics, or appreciate the Divine is surprising. It gives us hope for the eternal and all the more reason to aspire to a higher plane of existence, where altruism rises above our animal urges. It ain’t easy. Civilization takes generations to construct, hours to destroy. Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians. We call them children. - Hannah Arendt The tool we have to construct and maintain civilization is the culture we teach our young, the mores and tenets of our faith. It may be unnecessary, and it can still be taught to those who believe the Divine to be fictional, but it is easier to teach when we believe in a higher power. It isn’t important whether the higher power is interested in doling out punishment or reward. It is just important to know that there is meaning. We are fools when we fail to defend our culture, the culture that has produced the greatest freedom and prosperity the human race has ever known. Impiety, cynicism, fashionable elites go hand in hand to take a pick-axe to our foundations. They do so in favor of impractical utopias or out of ignorant estimation for every culture but their own. Then the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone, All centuries but this, and every country but his own; - W.S. Gilbert, The Mikado Medicine is part of that higher evolution of mankind, a very young science indeed. To harness an understanding of biology, physiology, anatomy, chemistry at a sufficient level of understanding, gained over many years of study and apply it to healing the illness of another human- this truly exercises the spark of divinity deeply buried within our animal selves. Applied well, suffering is alleviated. Applied poorly, suffering is multiplied, and that most precious of commodities extinguished. The opportunities for the selfish, careless part of ourselves to cause injury, to abuse the privacy and confidence of the patient are staggering indeed. Guardrails must be created to properly channel the power of this role. Discipline must create the discipline. In the universe of the Dune science fiction novels created by Frank Herbert, the possibility that a physician could be employed to harm a member of a royal family when interplanetary stakes are involved led to the creation of an elite class of doctors. The Suk school trained physicians, and imprinted in them an unbreakable code of ethics. A breach in the code would trigger what the books call a “pyretic conscience.” The novels don’t explain what that involves, but it doesn’t sound like fun. We don’t have anything like that yet. What we did have, for many years, years when a greater faith perhaps existed, was an oath, sworn to Aesculapius, Apollo, and all the Gods. It has fallen out of fashion, and where it exists, has been bowdlerized to some extent. Some attacked it as impious as it referenced Gods no longer worshipped, as if God could not appreciate a good thing done in the name of another. Others attacked elements of the oath as archaic, ignoring the contemplation of the putatively outdated concepts as metaphors. It is worth revisiting in its oldest forms. I swear by  Healer, by , by , by , and by all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will carry out, according to my ability and judgment, this oath and this indenture. Business does creep in Priesthood White coat Anything that can keep you in the higher plane This is a place where faking it til you make it might be worthwhile