I am the odd man out in a family of medical folk. My maternal grandfather was a physician; his daughter, my mother, was a medical technologist; my mother-in-law, a nurse. My brother is a physician; so is one of my daughters, and so is her husband. An aunt was a registered nurse, and my niece is a hospital nutritionist. Beyond the family circle, I have many friends practicing the medical arts, including America’s most distinguished psychiatrist, Paul McHugh. I’ve also been blessed by the work of great physicians, whose skills and dedication have gotten me beyond the biblical allotment of “three score years and ten” (Ps. 90:10).
Decades of life with and around doctors, nurses, and other medical practitioners have thus given me a deep regard for American medicine, which I believe to be the best in the world. And it’s precisely that regard that now leads me to a deep concern about the condition of medicine in these United States—which, like the other professions, is beset by the plague of wokery, and by physicians’ cooperation with what Pope St. John Paul II aptly called the “culture of death” in the 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae.
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