Medicine and Spirituality

Reprinted from the Asian Journal
February 8, 2008

Some readers may wonder if the MD after my name was for real. After all, except for two articles about traditional Philippine remedies, I have not written anything related to medicine since starting this column in October.

Well, it is. I earned it back in 1974. For the last 33 years, I have been working as a physician and surgeon -- 13 years in academia and two decades in clinical practice. It is not unusual for physicians to write about religion and spirituality.

That may be because of the very thin line that separates medicine and spirituality. When doctors run out of stuff from their medicine bag to save a patient's life, it is time to call in the priest to administer the last sacraments and "take it from there." Likewise, there is nothing like being hospitalized or going under the knife to encourage serious reflection on things beyond the temporal world.

Dr. Alexis Carrell (1873-1944) was the first physician in the United States to win the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology. Born and raised in France, he immigrated to the US in 1906 and worked at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City. Among other things, he did pioneering work in vascular surgery and blood transfusion. He invented the technique of connecting severed blood vessels after the assassination of the French president. Dr. Carrel was convinced that, if doctors knew how to repair and anastomose blood vessels, they could have saved the president from exsanguinating to death.

Dr. Carrell captured the attention of the scientific world when he described the technique of connecting the artery from the arm of a father to the leg of an infant to save the dying child from intestinal bleeding. He also became well known for his preliminary work on transplant surgery.

What is little known is that Dr. Carrell was as devoted to religion as he was to science. He faithfully made a pilgrimage to Lourdes every summer. He was so enthralled by the miraculous happenings in Lourdes that he wrote about them, stating that it was worthwhile investigating the religious phenomena and subjecting the healings to scientific scrutiny. This stance drew sharp criticism from both the scientific and clerical establishments.

A year after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1913, Dr. Carrell married Anne-Marie Laure de Meyrie. They had met as pilgrims in Lourdes.

Another physician who wrote on religious subjects was the famous Dr. Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965). Before entering medical school, he wrote The Quest for the Historical Jesus, the treatise that established his reputation as a theologian. His other religious writings include Civilization and Ethics, and Christianity and the Religions of the World.

In 1904, Dr. Schweitzer came across an article in a magazine appealing for health workers in Africa, so he decided to become a missionary physician. With the help of his wife Helene, who studied nursing so she could assist her husband, Dr. Schweitzer established a mission hospital in Lambarene, in the west central African country of Gabon.

Utilizing funds raised from lectures, concerts (he was an accomplished pianist and organ player), and royalties from his writings, he expanded the mission hospital to seventy units, providing care to 500 hospitalized patients.

Who has not heard about Dr. Tom Dooley (1927-1961), the remarkable young man who studied at University of Notre Dame before joining the US Navy Medical Corps in 1944? After earning his MD degree from St. Louis University in 1953, Dr. Dooley worked as a Navy physician and got involved in evacuating over half a million Vietnamese refugees. Later, he founded MEDICO and focused on building small hospitals in Southeast Asia where medical services were practically nonexistent. Named among the most outstanding young men of America, Dr. Dooley wrote three books: Deliver Us From Evil (1956), The Edge of Tomorrow (1958), and The Night They Burned the Mountain (1960).

Dr. Adrienne Von Speyr (1902-1967) was the first female physician in Switzerland. Her father was an ophthalmologist and her brother was a general practitioner. Dr Speyr was a remarkable person who, despite her uncontrolled diabetes, crippling arthritis, and coronary artery disease, maintained a very busy practice, attending to 60-80 patients a day. In addition to her ailments, she received the stigmata. Yet, somehow, she found the energy to found a lay religious institute. She also wrote or, when she got very sick, dictated (to theologian Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar, her spiritual director) 60 books essentially dealing with Christian spirituality.

We all know about St. Luke the Evangelist, who wrote one of the four Gospels of the New Testament and the Acts of the Apostles. Well, St. Luke was also a physician, who probably studied medicine at the famous school in Tarsus, and may have worked for some time as a ship doctor. St. Paul in Colossians 4:14 refers to him as "Luke, our dear physician."

Medicine and spirituality run along parallel pathways. Indeed, there is a tradition of physicians writing about spirituality and religion over the centuries.