I take taxis often. If the taxi driver is a good professional and likes to read, I will give him a book. I coincided with one to whom I had already given my book, Libroterapia, which includes a chapter on the great writer Anton Chekhov. The taxi driver told me that he had been struck by the passage in which I say that the writer Simon Leys believed that, if you have to operate and you must choose between two surgeons of equal technical ability, it is best to choose the one who has read Chekhov.
The reason Leys argued was that anyone who has been moved by reading his works will surely take into consideration much more than the body of the patient on whom he operates.
The taxi driver asked his surgeon brother if he had read Chekhov. When he said no, the reading taxi driver joked that maybe he wasn't such a good surgeon, to which his brother laughed and told him to go fry asparagus.
All of this highlights the surprising richness of life when people possess the gift of curiosity. This permeability allows us to experience more worlds than just our own. This brilliant Russian author – who was a doctor – links everything that he saw and felt in his works. And these, alive, slide, years later, through a distant city in the conversation of two strangers, who cease to be strangers thanks to them.
If all goes well, when they develop the curriculum for the Medicine degree, they will take it into account. This has been the case at the UPF, which has included a Humanities subject with the aim of “restoring the soul to medicine” where students read, among others, Tolstoy, and which reintroduces philosophy, literature and art into training. medical and whose purpose is to promote a more personalized and human relationship between doctors and patients. The one who seeks to cure you, or at least take care of you, must understand not only illnesses or injuries. He goes beyond treating a body; It involves addressing a person's stories, dreams, hopes, ambitions, and defeat. There is much more at stake than it seems: neither more nor less than life itself. So it is welcome as a subject in the curriculum “Surgery, II, what we learn from Chekhov”.
