NEWS FEATURE: Roles of Belief, Unbelief in Medical Practice Debated

c. 2000 Religion News Service BOSTON _ Two celebrated doctors from rival institutions, one a man of faith and the other a skeptic, met on a stage here last week with a dicey challenge: engage each other on the role beliefs play in medical practices. It could have been an ugly mud toss or a […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

BOSTON _ Two celebrated doctors from rival institutions, one a man of faith and the other a skeptic, met on a stage here last week with a dicey challenge: engage each other on the role beliefs play in medical practices.

It could have been an ugly mud toss or a sparsely attended flop. But the first installment of “Dialogue: Belief and Nonbelief in Modern American Culture” instead drew a sellout crowd of 600 to the Copley Theater for an evening rich in startling confessions.


“It was very respectful,” said 68-year-old Lorraine Buchan after the event. “Otherwise, they couldn’t have been as open as they were.”

Those daring to bare their science-minded souls were two authors, Harvard internist Jerome Groopman and Yale surgeon Sherwin Nuland. Groopman took the believer’s seat as a physician with Jewish roots and “sensibilities.” Nuland, an agnostic who has rejected religion since his youth, sat opposite.

Both admitted the physician’s immense temptation to feel God-like in a lifesaver role and to see a patient’s death as a professional failure.

Nuland went further, confessing that he gave a lethal dose of morphine to a terminally ill 72-year-old Orthodox Jew in 1977 because he couldn’t bear the intensity of the family’s prayerful vigil outside the operating room on the eve of Yom Kippur.

“That was the result of the limitations of my nonbelief,” Nuland said. “Perhaps to satisfy my own conscience I decided not to let them suffer if I could end it 12 hours before. … Maybe in certain ways it was a selfish response. … It might not have been the right decision.”

Groopman admitted that even with faith to help him understand tragedy, he has shaken his head in bafflement, as at the time when he couldn’t save a man in his 20s who died of AIDS.

“I found myself unable to rationalize as a believing person such a horrific loss,” Groopman said. “I had no answer” for the man’s Roman Catholic father, who saw the doctor’s hands as an “extension” of God’s.


The idea for the Nov. 14 exchange came from Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini of Milan. His “Chair for the Nonbeliever” series has been wildly popular in Italy, drawing as many as 2,000 to auditoriums for personal discussions of the ways in which belief and or its lack affect various realms of modern life.

Martini claims the tension between belief and nonbelief is best seen not as a gantlet separating peoples but as a gnawing experience within each individual, “even the bishop.”

Atlantic Monthly Managing Editor Cullen Murphy heard Martini speak in 1998 at Harvard University and shortly thereafter made arrangements for the magazine to co-sponsor the forum with Boston College, a Jesuit university.

“In this country, there’s too little attempt by people on either side to understand how the mind works in people on the other side,” Murphy said. “But both are going to be with us for a long time, and they’re going to have to live together for a long time. So it’s better to approach the other side with empathy than with caricature or scorn.”

William Buchan, 68, of Saugus, Mass., said he was surprised how much he, a convert to Roman Catholicism, had in common with Nuland, who esteemed the power of love in human experience while rejecting divinity.

“I would say that he has a great faith,” Buchan said. “What he calls love, I call God.”


Nuland’s confessions also had a repentant quality that self-proclaimed sinners could appreciate. He told of his grief when he realized his passion to save certain patients was limited.

“They were poor whites, poor blacks, poor Hispanics. I couldn’t relate to them,” Nuland said. “The lives that have the most value to us are the ones we identify with the most.” Awareness of that prejudice, he said, galvanizes him to fight it in himself.

Groopman told how his faith combats a doctor’s worst temptations to see himself or herself as God and to see certain patients as unworthy of saving.

“This sense of stepping back from the tremendous intoxication with power comes from a deep religious sensibility” found in Jewish writings, Groopman said. “Idolatry in its extreme is the worship of the self.” And as for the value of patients, “Each of us is made in the image of God.”

DEA END MACDONALD

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