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Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Fit Philosophy


As some of my more dogged readers might remember, my mother once cautioned me about the folly of pursuing Philosophy instead of Medicine at University. Every mother, it seems, has dreams of their offspring becoming doctors, or lawyers -well, some societally respected career, at least- but her reasons seemed particularly pointed. “Even if you get a PhD in Philosophy,” she said, “you’ll only end up as a librarian in a small town somewhere in Saskatchewan.” Although I was born in one, I’m still not sure why she chose that example; I rather like the province.

But, looking back on it in my dotage, and after retiring from a long and enjoyable career in Medicine, I rather think she might have had something else on her mind than parental bragging rights, or imagined economic advantages. Perhaps she was wise beyond her years; perhaps she, too, had once been offered a similar opportunity, but chose to become a wife and parent instead of spending a decades-long stint in a university; perhaps she preferred a life of being and doing, rather than one of thinking and writing. Philosophy was like that in her day, I imagine: impractical and largely useless for a life well-lived.

For example, are ethics professors necessarily ethical, or like many marriage counsellors, is it just a day-job? Is an examined life only important when it is the subject of a lecture, or its opposite only decried in Philosophy essays published in as many obscure journals as is necessary to obtain university tenure? Rumours in the popular imagination are legion on the subject; antidotes are largely aspirational.

But perhaps it’s less a matter of appearance, and more an issue of untrained performance that afflicts Philosophy. Would you want a quarterback to play in an important game if he never practiced? Never really got to know the strengths and weaknesses of either his teammates or the plays he intended to use with them? An important component of any sport -and likely any philosophical theorem- is to learn from mistakes: learn how to correct them, learn how to avoid them. Error is inevitable, although in Philosophy, fortunately unlikely to result in the loss of anything worse than reputation, or invitations to lecture at commencement ceremonies. But is Philosophy anything like a sport: something best learned through practice, and then applied?

Of course, considering it as a sport is almost apostasy. Surely something performed almost completely in the mind could not be further from the competitive physicality of sport. And yet, in its very early days, Philosophy was intended to alter the character of its practitioner as much as sport would transform their body.[i] Ideas, in essence, needed to be cultivated, not merely contemplated; a Philosopher has to practice in order to improve as much as does an athlete -skill does not just happen on its own. And if they then do not act on what they have decided is correct, they are much like an athlete who has trained, but never competes, said Epictetus, an ancient Greek Stoic (c50-c135 CE). Action should follow theory, followed by the application of what has been learned to revise the theory – it acts sort of like a feedback loop, I suppose: closing the circle.

But we are all philosophers in one way or another, I think. We may not know the formal names of the concepts about which we have deliberated and not be aware that they may have been the subject of debate over the centuries; we may not understand the difference between induction and deduction, or give a fig about rhetorical devices, and yet we test our thoughts in the arena of our everyday lives, blissfully unaware of any tradition that attends them.

I had coffee with a friend and his wife yesterday; I saw them at the Food Court in a local mall and sat with them to pass the time. James was somebody I had known for years, and was a member of the group of retirees that met on Wednesday mornings because their wives needed a reprieve from their now ever-present husbands. I’d only seen Cora on those few occasions when she’d come to fetch James to take him shopping but she was always a welcome contrast to the slouching James I usually saw with his baggy sweat shirts, wrinkled jeans, and inevitably tousled puff of snow white hair. Yesterday, true to form, she sat like a matriarch with not an auburn-coloured hair out of place on her head, nor a button missing on her ivory blouse. It was clear who was in command.

But for all her elegance, she wore a sad face, and they both were almost huddled together across the table as I approached. I have to admit that I wouldn’t have intruded on their discussion had James not noticed me in the line at the counter and waved me over.

Cora smiled in recognition, and yet her brow remained wrinkled, and her smile evanescent.

“Cora’s best friend just died, G,” James explained to me as I sat down at the table with them.

A difficult silence followed after I expressed my condolences to her. Her eyes returned to the table as she searched for her almost empty plate to clear a space for me. I’ve never been terribly good with silence I’m afraid, so I asked her if her friend had been in ill health.

She shook her head firmly. “She lived life to its fullest…”

“Her friend was still a committed runner even in her eighties,” James, added, reaching for Cora’s hand to squeeze it.

“She always said that it was important to do what you could as long as you could… And she enjoyed running along the trails in the woods by her house.” Cora’s expression softened as she searched the ceiling for further words that could explain.

“She was a high school English teacher when she was younger, and then became a writer after she retired,” James interjected.

Cora withered him with a glare. “Susan was always a writer, Jay,” she scolded and then dropped her eyes from the ceiling onto my face. “She wrote about children, G, then tried out her ideas on them. They loved her enthusiasm…”

For some reason, her eyes made me think I should say something. “What sort of things did she write? Novels, Poetry…?”

Cora’s eyes softened for a moment and then resumed their travels along my face. “Poetry, mostly. She loved similes and metaphors…” She stopped to wipe a tear off her cheek. “In fact one of her poems made it onto the provincial curriculum for Grade 12.”

She closed her eyes for a moment as she remembered her friend. “… ‘All these years, I’ve lived with words pouring from me like children from a school at recess’, she used to say. In fact that may have been one of the lines of her poem… I’m not sure, though…” She sighed at another sudden recollection. “She once told me that her students loved to ask her questions and watch her listen. Silence was her gift to them when they were speaking.”

James rolled his eyes at that, but I smiled at the wisdom of her friend. “I wish I’d known her,” I said.

Cora beamed at my appreciation, and then her eyes twinkled at another memory. “You know, G, I think she died doing what she loved: running on a trail in the woods…”

I sighed and our eyes met. “Maybe that was Nature’s final gift to her.”

Her smiled broadened, and she reached for my arm to touch it. “Full circle, isn’t it?”

I nodded; it certainly was.

[i] https://psyche.co/ideas/philosophy-is-like-athletics-theory-must-be-put-into-practice

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