To my astonishment the poet began to describe with palpable resentment the shortcomings of his calling. If he had only become an honest craftsman ere he had devoted himself to writing! He was sick of the hard struggle. To be ever at loggerheads with the public, the critics, the publishers, and editors—those were the compensations of his calling. He envied me for being a physician. That’s a great, a noble, an ideal calling. A physician can do something for humanity! If he were not too old he would at once take up the study of medicine. To mitigate the pains of an invalid is worth more than writing a hundred good lyrics!
In those days I was not a little proud of the profession I had chosen. The poet was only saying openly what I thought in secret. “The physician is mankind’s minister.” How often later on have I heard these and similar words which were calculated to add fuel to the flame of idealism.
Ye gods! In real life how sad is the physician’s lot! Those outside cannot conceive it. The first thing to realize is the rarity of the instances in which the physician really snatches the victim from the clutches of Death; how rarely he eliminates suffering; how frequently, discouraged and bewildered, he fails to halt the ravages of disease. How his idealism makes him suffer! He is painfully aware that the craftsman comes nearer to his ideals than the artist. He becomes familiar with man’s limitless ingratitude and realizes that unless he is to go into bankruptcy he must adopt the “practical” methods of the business man. He is the slave of his patients, has no holidays, not a free minute in which he is not reminded of his dependance. He sees former colleagues and friends who have accumulated fortunes in business or in the practice of the law, whereas he has to worry about his future and, with but few exceptions, live from hand to mouth. But he must continue to play the role of the “idealistic benefactor” unless he is to lose the esteem of those who—stand outside.
Not long ago I read a fascinating description of a “sanatorium.” How within its walls fear blanches the cheeks of the inmates, how Death lurks behind the doors, how even the physicians avoid speaking above a whisper and glide with solemn and noiseless steps through the house of pain! Very pretty and sentimental; but utterly false,—as false as the observations of a littérateur who stands outside can make it. From within the thing looks quite different! While the surgeon is scrubbing and sterilising his hands someone is telling the latest joke, the assistants converse lightly and merrily, not at all as if a matter of life and death were going to be decided in a few minutes. And it is well for the patient that it is so. The surgeon and the assistants need their poise; they must not be moved by timidity, fear, or sympathy—emotions which cloud the judgment. Where one needs all one’s senses, there the heart must be silent. The public feels this instinctively. I have found that those physicians who practised their profession in a plain matter of fact way, as a business, were the most popular and the busiest. And, on the other hand, I know learned physicians who are all soul, whom everybody praises, esteems, heeds, but whom no one calls. The more highly the physician values his services, from a material point of view, the more highly he is regarded as an idealist, and vice versa.
That is how the idealism of the medical profession looks in real life. For many physicians their ideals are superfluous ballast. It often takes years before they find the golden mean between theory and practice, between ethics and hard facts.
And how is it with other vocations? In every case in which it is possible to look behind the curtains it will appear that the envious natures of those who stand outside magnify the advantages and overlook the unpleasant aspects.
All life is a continual game between hope and fulfilment, between expectation and disappointment. And therein lies our good fortune—that we can still be deceived. Were we in possession of all truth and all knowledge, life would lose its value and its charm. Only because, in a certain sense, we all stand outside, because the fullness of life and “the thing itself” will continue to be a riddle, are we capable of continuing on our journey and approaching erectly the valley of death in which the shades dwell.
“Father, the show is over!” A child’s sweet voice wakes me from my revery. Outside I again look at the children still standing there and staring with large, hungry eyes into the Circus....