.MTM5Nw.MTIwNzY4

19

those who were deeply and truly committed to the relief of humanity and the service of science. But don't you think that the general public recognition of good and evil has faded to such an extent that there is no longer a moral frame of reference. The concept of self-commitment as something to inspire admiration seems to have vanished; so its hardly to be wondered at that the young people who are completing their medical education as house officer in our hospitals, have come to consider the patients as illustrations in text books, placed in their hands purely for their edification."

  "I wondered ^'sometimes' if they even cared to study me as a text book!"
  "How often were you seen by a mature, competent doctor?"
  "Not very often, they didn't seem to be much involved."
  "In effect, then, you didn't have your choice.  But you choose

your lawyer, or your minister, or your plumber. You choose your friends. And yet you don't have your choice in that extremely important relationship between you, injured, helpless and bewildered as you were, and the person qualified to save and sustain you. It was lucky that Miss Effie contrived to retain a choice!"

  "It surely was.  I owe my recovery to her.  But now

Doctor, if I understand you correctly, the medical world has evolved from the horse and buggy but somehow in the course of that evolution, it has changed its character and shifted its ideals - or has it lost them? Do changes in methods necessarily imply changes in purpose?"

  "I think I'd rather give you a literary answer, at least

for the moment. You've probably read some of the books of that curious writer, Kafka? Perhaps you remember a maxim which reads something like this - I can't give it to you exactly: "Leopards broke in and drank the sacrificial chalices dry - This happened repeatedly, until it became a part of the ceremony." "The acolytes didn't turn into leopards, you mean." "But they not only failed to defend the chalice against