I take taxis often. If the taxi driver is a good professional and likes to read, I give him a book. I matched 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 was struck by the passage in which I say that the writer Simon Leys was of the opinion that, if you have to have an operation and you have to choose between two surgeons of equal technical ability, it is better to choose the one with read Chekhov.
The reason that 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 he is operating on.
The taxi driver asked his surgeon brother if he had read Chekhov. When she told him no, the reader taxi driver joked that maybe he wasn't such a good surgeon. His brother laughed and told him to go make fists.
All of this highlights the amazing richness of life when people have the gift of curiosity. This permeability allows you to experience more worlds than just your own. This brilliant Russian author – who was a doctor – links everything he saw and heard in his works. And these, alive, glide, 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 draw up the curriculum for the Medicine career, they will take this into account. This has been the case of the UPF, which has included a Humanities subject in order to "restore the soul to medicine" where students read, among others, Tolstoy, and which reintroduces philosophy, literature and art in medical training , and which aims to promote a more personalized and humane relationship between doctors and patients. Whoever tries to cure you, or at least take care of you, must understand not only diseases or injuries. It goes beyond treating a body; it involves addressing a person's stories, dreams, hopes, ambitions and defeat. There is much more at stake than meets the eye: nothing less than life itself. So that it is welcome as a subject of the study plan "Surgery, II, what we learn from Chekhov".
