Catholics, Hippocrates, and reforming American medicine 

I am the odd man out in a family of medical folk. My maternal grandfather was a physician; his daughter, my mother, was a medical technologist; my mother-in-law, a nurse. My brother is a physician; so is one of my daughters, and so is her husband. An aunt was a registered nurse, and my niece is a hospital nutritionist. Beyond the family circle, I have many friends practicing the medical arts, including America’s most distinguished psychiatrist, Paul McHugh.

I’ve also been blessed by the work of great physicians, whose skills and dedication have gotten me beyond the biblical allotment of “three score and ten” (Psalm 90:10).

Decades of life with and around doctors, nurses, and other medical practitioners have thus given me a deep regard for American medicine, which I believe to be the best in the world. And it’s precisely that regard that now leads me to a deep concern about the condition of medicine in these United States — which, like the other professions, is beset by the plague of wokery, and by physicians’ cooperation with what Pope St. John Paul II aptly called the “culture of death” in the 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae.

The willful participation of physicians and other medical professionals in the practice of abortion flatly contradicts the Hippocratic Oath—long the moral framework for sound medical practice—in its original form. Indeed, some medical schools have been changing the oath’s wording in order to accommodate the politically correct view of abortion. Why, one wonders, haven’t more doctors, nurses, and health care workers been at the forefront of the pro-life movement, not only in pressing for legislation protective of unborn life but in counseling frightened women, often abandoned by irresponsible and sexually predatory men, to seek alternatives to killing their children? Thank God for the medical professionals who staff America’s crisis pregnancy centers. But what about the majority of their colleagues, who acquiesce in the modern slaughter of the innocents or, worse, participate in it?

The same degradation of medicine occurs when doctors, nurses, and others involved in health care participate in euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide, a ghoulish practice that now marches under the Orwellian banner of “MAID” — Medical Assistance (or Aid) in Dying. Hippocrates weeps. Isn’t the entire point of the profession of healing to affirm life, sustain life, and resist death whenever possible? This past September, the London-based Spectator published an instructive article, “A Chillingly Seductive Glimpse of Assisted Dying,” which should be required reading in medical schools, in part because it illustrates how MAID numbs the natural human sensibilities of physicians and nurses.

“Follow the science” has become a mantra in certain quarters since Plague Time in 2020-2021. Evidently, however, some science isn’t welcome — like the science that demonstrates beyond reasonable dispute that “sex-reassignment” interventions do not lead to long-term improvements in mental health, and that mutilating the bodies of the young surgically or through puberty blockers should be called child abuse, not medicine. If England’s National Health Service can figure this out by following the science, why can’t the American Academy of Pediatrics?

And then there is medical education, once known for its rigor but now catering to snowflakes, as in this notice from a prominent medical school promoting a putatively admirable service for its students — “Wellness Wednesdays: A monthly event offering students a chance to unwind and recharge with such activities as arts and crafts, live student performances, and wellness services like seated massages….”

I don’t know about you, but if I’m bringing a convulsing child with a 105-degree fever into the local emergency room at 2 a.m., I’m not interested in the attending ER doctor sending out for Legos, singing rap ditties from Hamilton, or getting a “seated massage” in order to handle the stress of the situation.

American medicine and American medical education are in need of serious reform. Getting the federal government’s healthcare agencies out of the DEI swamps and the gender-fluidity wilderness is only a start, welcome as that is. American medicine needs to rediscover its soul and its conscience. Well-catechized Catholic medical professionals are uniquely equipped to aid in that rediscovery. The Catholic Medical Association has a considerable role to play here. So do Catholic chaplains at American medical schools.

Given the wokery at the root of so many of these dysfunctions in American medicine — a tyranny enforced by cancel culture — Catholic medical reformers will need a lot of courage, as well as patience, tactical savvy, and impeccable scientific credentials. But then, courage is one of the four cardinal virtues, isn’t it?