Excerpts from "A Fortunate Man" by John Berger

It is true that my questions cannot be answered satisfactorily. But I was asking them to try to lead you to the point of realizing that we in our society do not know how to acknowledge, to measure the contribution of an ordinary working doctor. By measure, I do not mean calculate according to a fixed scale, but rather take the measure of. It is not a uqestion of comparing the doctor with the artist or with the airline pilot or with the lawyer or wirh the political stooge and then arranging them in a winning order. It is a question of comparing themso that in th elight of the other examples we can better appreciate what the doctor is ( or is not) doing.
When we hear of a team of ctors or biochemists discovering a new cure, we can acknowledge their achievements easily. A new cure contributes to "the advance of medicine." The acknowledgement if eay because the promise of the discovery remains abstract. It can be subsumed under "science" or "progress."
It is a very different matter when we imaginatively try to take the measure of a man doing no more and no less than eaying- and occasionally saving- the lives of a few thousand of our contemporaries. Naturally we count it, in principle, a good hting. But fully to take the measyre of it, we have ot come to some conclusion about the balue of these lives to us now.
The doctor is a popular herp" yu have only to consider how frequently and easily he is presented as such on television. If his traning were not so long and expensive, every mother would be happy for her son to become a doctor. IT is the most idealized of all the professions. Yet it is idealized abstractly. Some of the young who decide to become doctors are influenced by this ideal. But i would suggest that one of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because when the abstract idealism has worn hin, they are uncertain about teh value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is beacause they live in and accept a societywhich is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.
If cannot afford to. If it did, it would either have to dismiss this knowledge and with it dismiss all its pretences to democracy an dos become totalitarian: or it would have to take account of this knowledge and revolutionize itself. Either way it would be transformed. Let me be quite clear. I do not claim to know what a human life is worth. There can be no final or personal answer- unless you are prepaed to accept the medieval religious one, surviving from the past. The question is social. n individual cannot answer it for himself. The answer resides within the totality of relations which can exist within a certain social structure at a certain time. Finally man's worth to himself is expressed by his treatment of himself.
But since social development is dialectical and there is always a contradiction between the existing social relations and what is becoming possible, one can sometimes preceive tha the existing answer is inadequate for quesitons raised by certain new developments of activity or thought.
I have never forgotten a paragraph in an essay of Gramsci's which I first read years ago He wrote the essay in prison in about 1930. " Thus the problem of what man is always posed as the problem of so-called "human nature", or of "man in general", the attempt to create a science of man- a philosphy- whose point of depature if primarily based on a "unitary idea", on an abstraction designed to contain all that is "human". But is humanity, as a reality and as an idea, a point of departure, or a point of arrival?"
Is humanity as a reality and as an idea a point of departure or a point of arrival?
I do not claim to know what a human life is worth- the question cannot be answered by word but only by action, by the creation of a more human society.
All that I do know is that our present society wastes and, by the slow darining process of enoforced hypocrisy, empties most of the lives which it does not destory; and that, within its own terms, a doctor who has surpassed the stage of selling cures, either directly to the patient or through the agency of a state service, is unassessable.