Medicine, Men Of The Cloth And Mammon

Money was, perhaps, never meant to be a part of religion or of medicine. There was a time when physicians did not have a rate card and men of God lived on charity. Then the greenback serpent entered the idealistic worlds of both and offered them visions of great wealth and power. It was too much to expect them not to succumb. The few who didn’t were left behind and not counted.

Healing – the Body and the Soul

Both professions are supposed to be about healing – while one looks after physical wellness, the other looks after spiritual well being. Time was when these were ‘noble’ professions – when sons were offered to enter the priesthood or were given to study under physicians in order to learn and grow into these professions. Healing was god-like and that meant that you could not be earthly when it came to being compensated. So it was left to the one who was administered to – body or soul – to give what he deemed best.

When it came to religion, most priests lived by taking a portion of what was offered to the gods. This was their payment for selflessly serving the divine. They were to take only what they needed – not what they wanted – and then leave the rest to be distributed to charity. Physicians were the same. They treated the sick and the suffering and for their care and concern, they were given cash or kind – it wasn’t right for them to ask for anything.

Take the old Levite tradition for example – this tribe was the one from where the Jewish priestly class emerged – they were not given any land in the promised land. Instead all the other eleven tribes had to give them one tenth of what they got. In this way, they were allowed to do God’s work and were supported by the rest of the community.

This is very similar to the Brahmin tradition in India where the priestly class was entrusted with educating the people and running the temples. As they indulged more and more in literary pursuits, they were soon asked to advise the kings about military and other strategies – which they did very well. Very soon, power and money beckoned and the simple life was left behind.

Later, came the Christian priests and the nuns who didn’t or rather, weren’t supposed to call anything on this earth their own. They were here to serve the Lord and humanity at large. From living lives with just the bare necessities however, many of them grew to embrace a life of comfort and even luxury, wielding great power over the people who they were supposed to look after.

Take the case of the physicians or of the healers of the bodies all over the world. There was a time when it meant a life of hard work and a tremendous amount of sacrifice. It was their commitment to the well being of mankind that made them take up that particular profession. Man or beast – physicians were those selfless beings who were at everyone’s beck and call, always smiling, soothing away aches and pains and fevers and helping you get back into the wellness zone.

If we go back further in time, the witch doctors or the Druids were very much the same – their job was to cure or try their best to cure whichever patient came to them – king or pauper. More often than not, they are portrayed as living in little huts away from the main populace of a village and practicing their medicine with herbs, roots and rituals, the knowledge of which was passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation.

Enter Money

Once their eyes started lighting up at the sight of money, it was the beginning of the end. Suddenly, money was the ultimate goal, not the wellbeing of people. Once the focus shifted from the ones they had vowed to look after to themselves, the picture changed and it was the power of money that became important – not the power that their profession gave them over illness or ignorance. A J Cronin’s The Citadel is a perfect example of how money can insidiously compromise a physician’s ethics.

Is there merit in religion and medicine going back to the days of dedication and working for whatever was given? Can we really take the money factor out of what has grown to become among the most paying professions? If only we could take the money out and put the ethics back in, maybe a lot of ills in this world would get ironed out – but then again, maybe that is being too simplistic and hoping for too much. What is relevant however, is that Mammon should not have pride of place in medicine or religion.