St. Luke, the Patron Saint of Doctors

For family reasons, I have spent a lot of time recently in a university hospital in Switzerland. The doctors there are well-trained, efficient, polite and hard-working.

Today, as I was watching several of them try to figure out what to do, I thought about the doctors around the world who work in far worse conditions and with older equipment and medications. Medecins sans Frontiere, for example, is all over the world, and especially in Africa, trying to help in natural disaster conditions, with war casualties, and preventing or arresting epidemics.  

There were images this week of doctors in Tripoli, asking the world for help because they had no more blood plasma or drugs.  Doctors have been arrested or harassed in Syria for trying to help the wounded.

In Europe and America, we tend to think of doctors as a highly-paid elite whose social and financial advantages are great. But, there are doctors all over the world, from the Appalachians to Bangladesh, from Haiti to the Philippines, who are working long hours under enormously difficult conditions simply to save lives and make everyday existence less dangerous.

And, just a word for the generalists, a rapidly disappearing type of doctor. Today, I watched as one, named for the patron saint of doctors and very close to retirement, made a special trip to the Swiss hospital to try to help an old friend battling serious infections and the younger doctors whose experience may be lacking for the problem they are wrestling with.