The Catholic Physician
The Catholic physician can be of genuine usefulness in his community in ways other than purely medical. He can be, of course, a public man, a citizen of force and character, aiding in preventing the lowering of the moral tone of public entertainments, of theatrical performance, motion picture exhibitions and, to some degree, of the public press. In the last case his influence is most effective in villages, towns or cities under 30,000 in population. Generally speaking, cities which contain upwards of that figure are beyond the sphere of influential control of a physician, unless he chances also to be the mayor, a high public official, or the chief owner of a very large industrial plant, or the owner of the principal newspaper.
A physician can always command the respect of the community if his life warrants it. He is fortunate at the outset in being a member of a profession that is ancient and is honorable in the history of mankind, and in song and story as well as in direct service to humanity. He is accepted as a gentleman by reason of his medical degree or license, and he can retain that position, secure a fair living, educate his children and enjoy a decent place in the community without great effort, merely by conforming to the expected customs and traditions of his profession.
Because of the very nature of his work he becomes the recipient of many secrets, not known to any but himself and the patients who confide in him. He learns of some things which are not revealed to a confessor, which do not come within the scope of the pastor, yet do affect the physical and moral welfare of the patients. The law recognizes that communications between a patient and a physician are, in general, privileged: that is, they need not be disclosed, unless the patient voluntarily waives the privilege, as by asking the physician to testify in court or by affidavit, for the benefit of the patient himself. Although not true in every instance, yet, speaking generally, the secrecy of the patient's recital to a physician, or what that physician has learned of the patient's mental or physical state by reason of his relation to the patient as a physician, is as carefully safeguarded by law, statutory or interpretative, as is the secrecy of the confessional.
The physician, therefore, has, by reason of the confidential quality of his relationship to the patient, a great opportunity to advise him upon matters that will be of importance to the present and future state of the patient, and perhaps, through such relationship affect seriously the welfare of a family or the peace of a community, if such advice be either unsound, improper or ill-considered.
In many instances, the patient seeks the counsel of the physician in a state of anxiety. A loved one has died. The patient has been closely associated with the one who has passed away and notes some of the very symptoms which affected the one who has passed away. The patient and the family are much concerned over the apparent gravity of the new case. Frequently it is difficult for the patient to express himself or herself in ordinary language. It requires much patience and skill to secure from the worried visitor anything like a sequential account of the symptoms, and skill is needed to bring the superlatives employed in describing the dreaded symptoms down to a correctness of proportion, and then to get a true perspective before the mind of the physician. When, at last, the physician has genuinely gauged the case and is able, with full knowledge and after careful weighing of all that has been said or discovered through the examination, — when the physician is able to tell that patient, as often happens, that the case is of no importance, that it has no element of seriousness, that the symptoms, so much dreaded, have no sinister significance in this case, and thus to ease the mind of the anxious patient, to ease the anxiety and allay the fears of the other members of the family, he has had an experience which makes him realize to the depths the value of knowledge. It makes him joyous that he possessed the skill, the training and the judgment to lift the load of care and anxiety from the depressed or nervous patient and from the members of the family.
Again and again, in his years of professional experience, he will fail of material rewards. He will be defrauded of the fees he earned so hard. He will be misunderstood. A chance word may seriously injure him financially and, for some time, perhaps, socially. He may be dismissed from a case because he is not winning expected results quickly enough. He may be supplanted because he can hold out no hope, and large sums may be paid to less truthful men, who promise better results, secure fees of importance, and, in the end, by engaging language and skilled dissembling leave a family satisfied that the later attendant was thoroughly skilled and expert, although the case terminated just as the truthful physician first said it would. A hundred incidents of the kind that mar life's pathway and make the journey far from smooth may occur to the honest physician. But the joy that comes to him because he has had the good fortune to possess the skill and the knowledge to lift sorrow from worried minds, to assuage fears, to allay anxiety, to bring good news where the opposite was feared — this will repay him again and again for all the other annoying an unpleasant incidents. No fee is too high, within the means of a patient, to pay for good news.
Many non-Catholic physicians have little or no religious belief. Often it happens that the study of medicine leads to materialism, when the student has little solid foundation of belief at the start. To many men the mystery of life brings no suggestion of God, a Creator, an All-Powerful Force in the direction of the world. The being who breathes whether he thinks to breathe or not: whose lungs again and again perform that extraordinary feat of permitting the oxygen of the air to pass through a lining membrane of the air-cells which will not let a fluid escape, to have that oxygen combine with the carbon in the blood, and now chemically combined into something which is neither oxygen nor carbon, but is carbonic acid gas, to pass this material back through that membrane and out of the body by the act of expiration, a being who takes into his body red tomatoes, green lettuce, white pork, purple beets, brown coffee, white milk, yellow oranges and various other foods, to have them, without will on his part, converted into a whitish fluid, which is absorbed from the lining of his intestines, is elaborated into blood and lymph, which nourishes his entire body, the thick, horny skin of the sole of his foot, the delicate gray cells of his brain: a being with all the marvellous powers and forces of man is, just of itself, an evidence to the mind that is coldly seeking causes for these wondrous things that some cause, a constant, directive cause establishes the laws which guide the functions of this wonderful human body and make the marvellous achievements of the human mind possible.
It is strange that physicians should not be always men of deep and abiding belief in an All-Wise God. But it is the fact that a great many non-Catholic physicians are materialistic. Because of this absence of religious belief, of strength and directing power in their own lives and on the lives and morals of their patients, some such physicians are not the force for good in the community that their professions could easily enable them to be, if a higher force than self, than desire for gain, the wish for success, the desire to please good-paying patients, animated them.
The Catholic physician possesses that enduring quality of faith in God, in the Divinity of Christ, in the necessity for obedience to the commandments of God and of the Church, which will guide his acts as a physician. The right of the unborn to life, the duty of parents to take no steps to prevent the operation of natural acts and the expected consequences of such acts, the avoidance of those practices which lead to physical, moral and mental ruin are some of the things he must again and again explain and drive home to the erring, the weak and the selfish.
The entrance of women into so many occupations where formerly they were not to be found, has had consequences which come before the physician as well as before others in the community. Many men and women marry, deliberately intending to avoid the responsibilities and duties of parenthood, because they do not want the annoyance of caring for or bringing up children. The number was at all times in the history of America one not to be called tiny. But the industrial plants hiring women by the hundred: the stenographers, bookkeepers, highly paid women workers in scores of avenues of employment, have made the question of marriage take a different aspect from that which it had to the greater number of the people of a generation ago. Thousands of men and women marry who believe or say that, after they have saved up enough, they will then have the woman stop working and at that time they will agree to have a child. To many thousands who speak thus, the limit of the number of children, which they may permit, at some future date, to be born, is one, or at the most two. Up to that far-off time, when the expected savings or the greatly increased pay will permit the man and the woman to allow the laws of nature to operate, they plan deliberately to prevent the coming of any children: they plan deliberately, when they are learned enough in such knowledge, to prevent the conception of a child.
Every priest, every student of public affairs, every physician knows that this is a statement of fact. In the great city of New York a sheet is published, the very name of which tells of its mission, to prevent the conception or the birth of children. Women stand on Broadway selling it, by day or by night. Occasionally one sees a creature dressed like a man selling this sheet at night, on Broadway. The wife of a gentleman well known in educational circles and for his philanthropy, has again and again advertised that information of contraceptive devices will be sent by mail to those who desire it. Arrested for the practice, not yet punished, she seeks a method whereby the information so plainly printed on one sheet is not thus transmitted now. To the prospective customer or information seeker, one sheet is sent which contains various blanks where words are missing. A second sheet arrives later, on which are the words which are missing from the first sheet. By using both sheets, the information is plainly read by the inquirer.
To the Catholic physician come the seekers of self, those who desire information for the prevention of conception, or for the destruction of the unborn. Sometimes it is the woman, sometimes it is the man. Most of them know of the method for which God slew Onan. But impatience and other factors lead them into situations where they seek the destruction of the unborn. The woman fearful because she is a few days beyond an expected date, the woman who has had a secret for two or more months and now wishes freedom, the man who seeks to assure his guilty partner that no revelation of their misdeeds may come in the dreaded form of a child — these are familiar figures to all physicians.
The Catholic physician will, of course, be adamant against the proffer of money. He must, however, because of his faith, his duty and his responsibility as a Catholic, seize the opportunity to warn against the contemplated act. He must refuse information that tends to prevent conception. He must decline assistance to terminate pregnancy for the purpose of aiding a woman to destroy her flesh and blood. The average woman who seeks to bring this about pleads that it is "only a short time": she argues that the sin is not heinous because but a month or two have elapsed. If refused by the ordinary physician, she is not deterred from her purpose. She simply goes elsewhere. Self has destroyed the maternal feeling, or dwarfed it from expression. She does not regard herself as a murderess, nor does she regard her act in asking the physician to destroy the foetus as a request to commit a murder. She seeks safety from exposure, if unmarried, or freedom from care and annoyance, if married, at any cost that is short of her own life. Suffering she will endure, if future freedom from pregnancy can be had.
It is the experience of many physicians that when a mission has been in progress in a fair-sized parish, that a case or two of unmarried girls who need advice, sympathy and a husband will come before him. In such cases, the young man may be like many young men — not desirous of marrying the girl who yielded. But in just such a case, the tactful physician seeking the best interests of society and the principals themselves can utilize his skill, his knowledge of the human emotions, his power because of his professional relationship and his Catholicity to bring about a marriage between these unhappy people.
Again and again the Catholic physician will deal with cases where nervousness of something more than ordinary severity occurs in a man or his wife or in both. Often the cases that are now in mind occur in those with no children, or those who have one child and that child is several years old. The patients are the men more frequently than the women. Men are the aggressors sexually, but women can always endure excesses or perversions better than men. They can suffer more — paradoxical as it seems to say it — because they suffer less. To put it in another way, they do not feel pain as keenly as men, and there is, in most of them, a certain passiveness compared with men, which permits them to endure some things longer than men.
In the cases now referred to, the physician finds, if he is skilled in reading signs and tracing thoughts, that the underlying cause for the nervousness is a violation of the laws which regulate certain matters in life, or should regulate them. With some of these cases insanity is certain. In many of them a prolonged siege of mental suffering and of physical ills, with greatly impaired efficiency for the business demands of the patient mean a penalty for the violation of nature that is so certain and so inevitable that the physician, even at his best, may frequently fail to do more than give some alleviation of the distressing symptoms and conditions.
The Catholic physician has the duty to inform those who seek contraceptive devices and methods, who seek destruction of the unborn, who do things that invoke the certainty of Divine wrath and violate the true life of the united man and woman, that physical well-being demands that the course of nature be followed: that moral duty compels the Catholic man and the Catholic woman to heed the teachings of the Church, which forbid these hideous things and compel the physician to speak of and to warn against these awful errors of conduct and that the very after years of the man and the woman are filled with fateful reckonings of pain, weakness, paralysis, helplessness, insanity and premature age or death.
If the physician has years given to him, he will see, in strength and health, young men and women winning laurels, seeking honors and high places in education, in the business world, in many forms of human activity, bringing joy to their parents and their families, who would never have seen the world or drawn a breath of life but for the faith and the courage of a Catholic physician.
© Joseph F. Wagner, Inc.
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