It's no accident that Sherlock Holmes was created by Arthur Conan Doyle, a real-life physician who was as observant as a medical practitioner would be and as imaginative as a fiction writer should be. His greatness, in my opinion, lies in applying knowledge as much as in expanding it.
When applying knowledge, every medical practitioner worth his or her salt must also notice the gap, big and small, between what's learned and what has to be unlearned or relearned. It is when and where new knowledge is gained and expanded. For example, in the Napoleonic Wars, French surgeon Dominique Larrey (1766-1842) found that the pain of amputation was substantially dulled when limbs were frozen by snow and ice. His weather-related discovery inspired today's cryoamputations performed on the critically ill diabetic patients with infected, gangrenous extremities.
On the flip side, knowledge gained and applied could also be lethal in the hands of medical doctors serving murderous regimes. Do I need to elaborate on the horrors of concentration camps and gulags? In such cases, medical science is not to blame; it's those scrub-wearing butchers who must answer for their crimes.
Medical scientists, as scientists in general, have to address morality. In this regard, a U.S. Army doctor told me that she would try to save the lives of wounded terrorists, provided that they were absolutely disarmed and medically subdued. You never know what a suicidal fanatic would do next.
Indeed, treating evil-minded patients always poses the greatest challenge.
Author: renqiulan
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