Physicians

Justin Kimball had not even worked a year in health care when he invented medical insurance in 1929. A former teacher, the vice president of Baylor Hospital in Dallas watched the stock market crash and was thinking about money. His hospital was half empty and sitting on piles of unpaid bills. Kimball said, “the people who owed them had no money.”

His solution was the earliest version of modern health insurance. The hospital sold it to Dallas schoolteachers for 50 cents a month. The plan was instantly popular. Thus began the Blue Cross and Blue Shield family of insurance companies. Kimball was watching out for his employer’s bottom line, but he and the Texas Baptists who oversaw the hospital were also following in the footsteps of the early church.

When the plague struck third-century Rome, Christians organized themselves to care for the sick and the dying as both the government and their pagan neighbors looked on (helplessly). These public displays of righteousness persisted despite growing persecution of the church. They also laid the groundwork for modern Western medicine. In less than a century, church-run infirmaries and hospitals emerged as formal parts of Roman society.

Like the early-church in Rome, modern Christians have been some of the first in and the last out in responding to medical needs. They have founded some of the world’s most important medical centers. They are a key driver of short-term medical mission trips, which provide an estimated $3.7 billion worth of volunteer health care in poor countries each year. And evangelical groups operate countless small hospitals and clinics around the globe, filling prescriptions and performing major surgeries for free.

John Hopkins professor Henry Mosley, told CT back in 1986, “Traditionally, Christian missions have led the way in caring for the sick. Mission agencies can take the initiative to demonstrate compassion and caring for those who are neglected by their governments.”

Victoria Price was working as a reporter for her local NBC affiliate station when she received an urgent suggestion to seek her doctor. But the idea didn’t come from a coworker or a supervisor; rather, it came from a viewer.

"Hi, I just saw your news report,” began the email in her inbox. “What concerned me is the lump on your neck. Please have your thyroid checked.” By itself, those words might be generally concerning, but it was the next bit that propelled Price into action. "Reminds me of my neck. Mine turned out to be cancer. Take care of yourself."

Price did consult her doctor, and it turned out--that eagle-eyed viewer was right. The lump was cancerous, and she eventually scheduled a surgery to get it removed.

Price expressed her gratitude on a subsequent Instagram post. Price said, "Had I never received that email, I never would have called my doctor. The cancer would have continued to spread. It's a scary and humbling thought. I will forever be grateful to the woman who went out of her way to email me, a total stranger. She had zero obligation to, but she did anyway."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Life is full of surprises, so it behooves us as Christians to be humble enough to listen to prudent counsel.

In her book Confronting Christianity, Rebecca McLaughlin writes:

Paul Offit, a professor of pediatrics and vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania, had good reason to think religion hindered morality. In 1991, a measles epidemic had swept through Philadelphia. Hundreds of children got sick. Nine died. Offit was an attending physician at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. What differentiated these measles-stricken patients from other sick kids was how unnecessary their suffering was. Two Philadelphia churches, whose schools educated hundreds of children, had refused vaccination and medical care. Thus, the disease took hold and spread.

This incident was one among many that prompted Offit to write a book entitled Bad Faith: How Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine. Being nonreligious, he assumed he would “sound the same themes that have been sounded by militant atheists like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris: that religion is illogical and potentially harmful.”

But as Offit read the Bible and explored the history of medicine, he changed his mind. Jesus' advocacy for children moved him to tears. He concluded:

Independent of whether you believe in the existence of God . . . you have to be impressed with the man described as Jesus of Nazareth. At the time of Jesus’ life, one historian said that child abuse was “the crying vice of the Roman Empire.” Infanticide was common. Abandonment was common. That's because children were property, no different than slaves. But Jesus stood up for children, cared about them, when those around him typically didn't.

Offit now calls Christianity “the single greatest breakthrough against child abuse” in history. He notes that the first Christian emperor of Rome outlawed infanticide in 315 and provided a nascent form of welfare in 321 so poor families would not have to sell their kids. Ultimately, Offit changed the subtitle of his book from How Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine to When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine, acknowledging the massive impact Christianity has had on medicine and ethics.

In a Time magazine essay, Charles Krauthammer tells why he does not support stem-cell research "from embryos created purposely and wantonly for nothing but use by science":

When I was 22 and a first-year medical student, I suffered a spinal-cord injury. I have not walked in 32 years. I would be delighted to do so again. But not at any price. I think it is more important to bequeath to my son a world that retains a moral compass, a world that when unleashing the most powerful human discovery since Alamogordo—something as protean, elemental, powerful and potentially dangerous as the manipulation and re-formation of the human embryo—recognizes that lines must be drawn and fences erected.

For decades, Christian physician David Hilfiker has led a medical ministry in Washington, D.C.'s inner city. He writes:

Perhaps the deepest pain involved in living among the poor is the juxtaposition of my own limitations and woundedness with theirs. There are so many battered people all over the place! I sometimes wonder what the Good Samaritan would have done if the road to Jericho had been littered with hundreds of men beaten by robbers. One part of me wants to respond to every need I can, but another part is unwilling, perhaps unable. Numbness and cynicism, I suspect, are more often the products of frustrated compassion than of evil intentions.

After surgery, Charles Utley of San Diego discovered a swollen bump on his backside. It didn't subside as he healed. Utley soon discovered that his surgeon had left a sponge behind while sewing him up.

Rachel Zimmerman, in The Wall Street Journal says, "Even when doctors make mistakes this egregious, they customarily refuse to admit it, lest they encourage patients to sue." It's called "defend and deny."

But Utley's doctor did something astonishing. "I was responsible," the surgeon told him. "I apologize for this." Utley decided not to sue, explaining that his doctor had "honored me as a human being." Other doctors and hospitals, The Journal reports, are also discovering that "an authentically offered apology" does wonders heading off lawsuits. Patients, they're finding, can accept the fact that doctors are fallible. What infuriates them—and drives them to seek revenge—is when doctors say, "What sponge? I don't remember any sponge."

Katherine Hsu pioneered tuberculosis-prevention strategies now replicated around the world.

Born in 1914 in Fuzhou, South China, Hsu counts herself fortunate for having been raised in a Christian home.

From an early age, Hsu wanted to become a doctor. Growing up, she saw the devastating effects of diseases such as typhoid and diphtheria. Then tuberculosis took the life of a younger brother and sister. Believing that being a doctor was "a great purpose for living," she prayed that God would provide a way, promising to make the practice a ministry without charge to her patients.

Soon after that prayer, Hsu won a full scholarship to Peking Union Medical College, one of three applicants accepted. The more she studied the human body, the more she marveled at God's creation and worshipped him. Because her siblings died from tuberculosis, Hsu made the disease her primary focus.

"I had a drive to conquer it and find a solution that would save others from suffering," Hsu says.

Hsu joined the staff at the Pennsylvania Tuberculosis Hospital for Children, where she first witnessed the use of isoniazid to kill TB germs. Immediately, Hsu says, God gave her an idea: Why not use this drug to prevent children from getting sick? The hospital had no outlet for Hsu to test her concept, so once again the doctor prayed. A year later she received a letter from a place she had never heard of-—Houston, Texas.

Houston was in trouble. Tuberculosis outbreaks were rampant. The Baylor College of Medicine's chief of pediatrics invited Hsu to initiate a TB control program for the city's children. First, Hsu needed a clinic.

For the next six years, Hsu converted a dilapidated boarding school into a children's TB clinic where she began treating patients. Soon after, a local millionaire funded a transformation of the clinic into a modern hospital.

Hsu remembered her childhood promise to God to make her practice a ministry. She provided a home-like atmosphere for the patients, trying to model Christ's compassion. Winning her patient's trust, Hsu was able to conduct the longest TB-prevention study in history. For 30 years, she tracked the progress of more than 3,000 children, proving that isoniazid could be used to prevent TB-infected patients from becoming sick.

Six years after founding the clinic, Hsu created Houston's tuberculosis-control program, initiated a case registry still used today, and founded six new clinics in at-risk areas. Since opening, the clinic has maintained an unprecedented 75 to 80 percent patient recovery rate.

"This is not my own achievement, but what God has wrought by his mighty power," Hsu wrote in 1994 after receiving the coveted Distinguished Achievement Award from the 11000-member American Thoracic Society.

True to her word to God, Hsu has not charged a patient in more than 50 years. In addition, Hsu has used all of her medical awards to fund scholarships for students and missionaries.

"What you cannot do, God will work out for you," Hsu says. "Then you become an instrument in God's will. That is a great privilege."

Last summer I had an encounter with masked men bearing scalpels. A surgeon operated on my foot, and my life was never in danger. Yet the horizontal recovery time did give me a chance to reflect on pain that we choose voluntarily, sometimes for our own good and sometimes to our peril.

While rehabilitating, I often did exercises that hurt because I knew that working through the soreness would allow my foot to regain its usefulness. On the other hand, the surgeon warned against bicycling, mountain climbing, running, and other activities that might endanger the healing process. Basically, anything that sounded fun, he vetoed.

On one visit I tried to talk him into granting me a premature golf match. "Some friends get together once a year. It's important to me. I've been practicing my swing, and if I use only my upper body and keep my legs and hips very still, could I join them?"

Without a flicker of hesitation, my doctor replied, "It would make me very unhappy if you played golf within the next two months."

"I thought you were a golfer," I said, appealing to his sympathies.

"I am. That's how I know you can't swing without rolling that foot inward and putting weight on the parts that are trying to heal."

The point was obvious. My doctor has nothing against my playing golf; as a fellow golfer, he sympathizes with me. But he has my best interests at heart. It will indeed make him unhappy if I do something prematurely that might damage my long-term recovery. He wants me to play golf next year, and the next, and the rest of my life, and for that reason he could not sanction a match too soon after my surgery.

As we talked, I began to appreciate my doctor's odd choice of words. If he had issued an edict —"No golf!"— I might have stubbornly rebelled. He left me the free choice and expressed the consequences in a most personal way: Disobedience would grieve him, for his job was to restore my health.

The role of a doctor may be the most revealing image in thinking about God and sin. What a doctor does for me physically—guide me toward health—God does for me spiritually. I am learning to view sins not as an arbitrary list of rules drawn up by a cranky Judge, but rather as a list of dangers that must be avoided at all costs—for our own sakes.

Percent of U.S. doctors who treat the seriously ill who would be willing to hasten a patient's death by prescribing medication--11

Percent who would provide a lethal injection if asked--7

Percent who have done either--6

The disease of an evil conscience is beyond the practice of all physicians of all the countries of the world.