Dr. Jarvis’ “Sermon” to Nancy Pelosi
Dr Joseph Jarvis speaking on the street in front of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s house in San Francisco on 10/30/21 - at the Day of the Dead rally
Dr. John Symynges was one of London’s most successful physicians in the late 16th Century. He was wealthy, holding property in three counties, and widely respected throughout town. He was a senior member of the Royal Academy of Medicine. It is said he owed all of this to his shrewd business sense. His mantra for his medical practice was simple: “Before you meddle with (a patient) make your bargaine wisely now he is in paine.” Quite simply, he urged fledgling doctors to settle the fee for treatment while the patient was unable to really negotiate.
Dr. Symynges and his self-serving style of practicing the business of medicine, despite his pre-eminence during his own lifetime, would be entirely forgotten to us now, and deservedly so, but for the accident of history that by marriage he became the step-father of John Donne, one of England’s greatest poets, who was Dean of St. Paul’s during the last decade of his life. By then, Donne had already become more famous than his step-father and the sermons and meditations which he penned sealed his enduring fame.
Once while too ill to arise from bed, he heard the church bell tolling and wrote his seventeenth Meditation: “Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. . . The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth. . .No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were. .any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. . .Another man may be sick, too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me, if by this consideration of another’s danger I take mine own into contemplation.”
For Donne, illness in another, no matter how remote our contact, is to be shared, contemplated, and learned from. Wealth generated from the sick comes not as coin, but as shared human experience, for which the observer can be grateful. Applied to my professional life in clinical care, Donne’s words signal me to accept my calling as a requirement to subsume my self-interest and seek to attach myself to a cause greater than my own, because I am involved in mankind. Donne would have all of us contemplate our own personal danger as we make ourselves aware of the afflictions of others.
These lessons of 300 years ago need relearning now. Medicine, once again, has been reduced to a business opportunity.
In a nation where tens of millions have no financing for basic health care services, leading to tens of thousands of preventable deaths annually, our body politic has become paralyzed by a market-oriented health policy. Bells are tolling yet our Congress pretends that we are not diminished by the suffering of our fellow countrymen. They pretend that the afflictions of the uninsured are not theirs to share, as if Congress is an island, entire of itself. This despite the fact that we pay twice as much per capita for health care than do the citizens of the rest of the developed world, mostly in the form of the highest per person taxes for health care in the world.
What Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues are missing is the contemplation of our danger. Americans are least likely in the developed world to avoid death amenable to health care. We have allowed the business of medicine to so deviate our health system from its principle mission that preventable injury to hospitalized patients has become the 5th leading cause of death in our country.
Bells are tolling, Congress needs to hear and respond.
