Role models

We listened to a lecture by Dr. Raymond Alonzo Alonso, a distinguished nephrologist in the country and a member of our faculty. He happens to be one of the most eloquent, inspiring, and sensible people who has lectured in class, and he is a personal favorite. He simply drives the point home. He always carries a can of Coke Zero—or is it Lite?—sipping on it when his throat runs dry, and hardly does he ever look at his notes, as if he has everything stored from memory.

He asked us to think about what kind of doctors we'd like be in the future. A rich businessman who drives a Jaguar. A brilliant academician whose name appears in all sorts of journals. An astute clinician who always gets the diagnosis right. An accomplished policymaker who heads the Department of Health.

We could be any of these things, he said, but we musn't lose our compassion, a fundamental requirement to be a great doctor.

He asked us to think about the doctors we admire. He cited real but unnamed examples who are stellar in their fields but failures in their family lives. His point was that role models are not individuals but traits. I agree. These doctors: they, too, are humans; they, too, are flawed. But it dawned on me that, perhaps for the first time, Dr. Alonso could be missing something.

There once lived a Man who took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses (Isaiah 53:4). He healed the leper, the servant, the paralytic, and an entire crowd of helpless infirms (Matthew 8, 9). His name is Jesus, and He is nothing short of perfection, and He is the greatest doctor in history.

And how I desire to be just like Him.