Teaching Compassion to Us

You would think that one of the main drives to be a doctor would be an overwhelming feeling of compassion and a desire to alleviate suffering. Doctors should have compassion towards the ill, the dying, the grieving, the confused, the sad, the poor and the hungry, right? Yet you'd be surprised (or at least I hope so) by the lack of compassion that I sometimes find among my classmates. Oh, the school tries its best to teach us about empathy and understanding, and how to deal with different situations which require compassion (death, terminal diagnoses, unexpected pregnancies, etc.). But I wonder why so many people must be taught this simple feeling at such a late age (ahem, I'm 22), when there are so many opportunities to learn it beforehand. I worry that such a late-onset version is much less effective when dealing with patients, and may hinder students from being the best physicians possible. Maybe I'm wrong. I hope so. Be that as it may, I have always tried to teach E to find compassion and understanding for everyone. What is taught early need not be a deficit later.

The other day, we had just left Border's Bookstore and were headed home for an N-A-P (which begs another story for another post). As we drove in the right lane down the busy expressway, the traffic in front of us suddenly slowed. E, always sensitive to the undercurrents of the quality work of Volkswagen innovation we own, worriedly asked why we had slowed down. As we moved forward, the culprit came into view: a man was walking in the street.

He looked to be about 50 years old, and was hunched over and shuffling his feet slowly as he stumbled down the lane. I could see the impatient gestures of drivers in front of me as they swerved around him. He didn't flinch, didn't seem to care, caught up in the singlemindedness of the mentally impaired. When E and I pulled abreast of him, E leaned forward and waved to him through the window. Upon passing him, E sadly said: "That poor man. I think he needs some money."

I was instantly filled with shame, for the thought had not even crossed my mind. I turned the car around, intending to ask the man if I could help him. However, he had disappeared into the convenience store he had been headed for, and the person working there seemed to know him, so I left the man to him/her and started back toward home.

But the incident humbled me. Perhaps the problem is not that we were never taught the feeling, but that we have forgotten the act.