Doctors should think of their mothers

In the early 1960s, Ahn Chang-il Pediatrics was located in a poor neighborhood in Sindang-dong in Jung District, central Seoul. Park Chung-hee, then chairman of the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction, and Army General Kim Jong-oh lived...

BY SHIN BOK-RYONGThe author is a former emeritus professor of history at Konkuk University.

In the early 1960s, Ahn Chang-il Pediatrics was located in a poor neighborhood in Sindang-dong in Jung District, central Seoul. Park Chung-hee, then chairman of the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction, and Army General Kim Jong-oh lived across the street, and Kim Jong-pil, head of the Central Intelligence Agency, lived one block away. Ahn was the first doctor from the Catholic College of Medicine.

It was a time when there were not many doctors, so I went to Ahn Chang-il Pediatrics even though I was an adult. One day, a mother came in with a child suffering from a high fever. They didn’t seem well-off. Ahn took the child’s temperature and said it was not an illness so they should go home, keep the child cool and drink barley tea.

The mother was desperate and asked, “Are you not giving us any medicine?” The doctor said, “No medicine is needed because it is not a disease.” The anxious mother asked how much the treatment fee was. The doctor responded, “I didn’t treat anything, so how can I get paid? You can go.”

The poor mother bowed and left. Perhaps the mother had prayed for Ahn’s blessing with gratitude. It is a vivid memory for me after watching them 60 years ago, so the mother must have been grateful. One day, I read in the newspaper that Ahn Chang-il was appointed as the head of Dongsan Hospital.

In 2017, an obituary for Ahn, president of the Korean Pediatric Association who served as the head of Kyunghee Medical Center, was published in the newspaper. His son was the vice president of a general hospital. There were several articles remembering Dr. Ahn. He surely went to heaven. There was a time when there was such a doctor.

I am worried about the “resident doctors’ crisis.” Koreans have a stereotype connecting doctors with money. Doctors deserve to be happy after working hard and spending a long time training in addition to paying high tuition rates. They should not merely be expected to only save people. They should live in affluence. However, will their minds not change if their dying mothers are turned away from the ER? Today, people are not on the side of doctors