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This was a Julie-written article but I'll add a quick comment.

When I first graduated one of my part-time jobs was being on call for the prisons in Kingston area. As such I cared for patients in facilities including max security such as Millhaven, ,Bath, and (since closed) Kingston Pen. Some of these folks were very scary. Some were "criminally insane" and were left in handcuffs when I examined them. They did unspeakable things to one another, and to themselves.

I once treated the next-cell neighbour to notorious Paul Bernardo. I didn't ask and still don't know what he did to land him there in the segregation ward. Treating him like a human was my job. Judging him is God's.

-Chris

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Any astute student of history knows this is not harmless and will get worse before it gets better. Didn't Toronto Met announce a 75% DEI target? It doesn't take a genius to see where that's gonna go.

Humans are good at writing conventions, constitutions, pledges etc. but not really good at upholding them as Covid plainly and bluntly showed.

We have bio-ethicists like Arthur Caplan babbling about how it's ok for doctors to deny treatment to Russians. Call me old fashioned but including civilians as enemy combatants is evil. Ethics was erased during Covid.Even the Helsinki convention was flouted almost immediately by the Soviets. As for the Nazis, the Nazis don't achieve peak murder without the doctors and nurses.

Reminds me the biopic on John Adams who in his lifetime had become skeptical that the Americans were going to be able to hang onto the ideals of the Republic he inspired after the Sedition Acts which ran contrary to the concept of liberty.

We mean well trying to keep our internal demons in check. But it's a work in progress.

Humans. Pass the beer nuts.

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It was not just the Nazis. The communists under Lenin. Stalin and Mao were just as bad.

Now we have neo-Marxism that got its start by Antonio Gramsci, a founder of the Italian comminist party. He founded the theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how the state and ruling capitalist class — the bourgeoisie — use cultural institutions to maintain wealth and power in capitalist societies. (Wokism.) It started to grow in the late 1960s.

Gramsci saw it as fundamental to the attainment of power that cultural hegemony be achieved first. In Gramsci's view, a class cannot dominate in modern conditions by merely advancing its own narrow economic interests, and neither can it dominate purely through force and coercion. Rather, it must exert intellectual and moral leadership, and make alliances and compromises with a variety of forces.

That is what is going on now. Observe who is now in charge of public education, social services and some of our political parties. The warfare in Gaza is seen as an anti-colonalism fight and the wokes want to tie the indigenous activists into it.

He loved complicated language. The wokes today have changed nouns into phrases. The meaning changes and that is the point. A "vagrant" is now "a temporarly unhoused neighbour". An "addict" is now "a person who self-medicates to relieve the pain of past trauma."

Western society and culture, the Enlightenment, the rich, capitalism, mathematics and science are under attack. Racism has returned with a twist. The rich, white males, East Asians and the Jews are the new targets of discrimination.

This cannot last. The wokes need everything they hate. Will they give up electricty, advances in science, their cellphones and credit cards to return to a socialist paradise?

The Cultural Revolution died with the death of Mao. The wokes are like a cancer, it will die out when their failures can no longer remain hidden.

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It's a virus that's spread everywhere. Medicine and science included. And law. Especially law. The Chief Justice of Canada Richard Wagner has revealed himself to be a woke left-wing dullard deferent to government authority. That's a huge problem of bias.

I think it's fair to call academics, politicians, journalists etc. who espouse these views and language as Marxists or at least sympathetic to Marxist thought. There's nothing controversial in this statement. One can just pull out examples from their own words. Either they don't realize it (ie argue for price controls) because it's become so ingrained in the culture or they've knowingly embraced it intellectually. Much of what we're seeing can be sourced back to Gransci indeed.

Ghost of Gramsci.

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Sobering stuff.

Surely one of the most jarring examples of what you (rightly) describe as our duty to treat, regardless of who our patient is or what she or he has done, is the case of Yahya Sinwar, currently the maniacal head of Hamas. Years ago, during the 22 years he was imprisoned in Israel for murder, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour (some reports say a brain abscess). He underwent a long and intricate surgery by Jewish neurosurgeons to remove the thing , which indisputably saved his life. In 2011 he was freed in a prisoner swap, more than 1000 Palestinian prisoners for a single Israeli soldier. Sinwar exhibits his gratitude for the life-saving actions of his former captors by relentlessly pushing for the extermination of the Jews.

Yet our young, woke university students in this country are far more likely to celebrate the genocidal actions of Sinwar-led Hamas than to marvel at the ethical actions of those Jewish neurosurgeons.

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I have to admit this story destroys my pollyannaish wish to believe that goodness/kindness invariably generates the same among the recipients. Ultimately we can never expect that to happen. But it's very complicated. Interesting, for example, the various interpretations of the infamous Nazi defence "I was just doing my job." It seems that's what the Jewish neurosurgeons were doing: their job. The same phrase can be uttered in defence and in principle so that outside observers and history get to judge what is good and what is evil. Following that thought: would it have been "better" if the neurosurgeons had not done their job deciding instead not to treat Sinwar because they judged him to be racist, as such becoming judge, jury and executioner? Very disturbing thoughts all 'round and as well applied to the Royal College of Nurses' policy.

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The events of the past four years have, in many people’s minds, made it ok to refuse or deny treatment to people who hold opposing views. Patients requiring organ transplants in this country (Canada) are routinely refused care for not getting the covid shots. It is a short hop from there to refuse care to “racists, homophobes, transphobes, or whatever else is the perceived evil of the moment. Family physicians “discharge” clients who refuse vaccination. This is simply another method of denying care. During my nursing career I cared for all manner of very unsavoury individuals. (Use your imagination if you will and you will likely be only partly correct) I never refused to care for any of them. I viewed it as my responsibility to provide the best care I could whether I liked the patient or not. The current propensity to refuse care for whatever reason is a very troubling trend and simply feeds in to the burgeoning distrust of our current medical establishment.

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Great comment. I completely agree, our job is to treat the patient whether or not we agree with his worldview.

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I understand in this discussion, there is consensus on the need to treat everyone, regardless of the physicians' personal feelings. Perhaps a further discussion could address how to treat those for whom there may be little respect.

I speak from personal experience when I cite my own experiences and those of which I have heard, and those I have observed.

In my case, I had no idea I was old until, updating my family doctor on visits to a couple of specialists she recommended, I mentioned I had come to the conclusion that they had all decided I was old and not worth their time. She did not disagree.

People have told me that, having waited weeks, or in some cases months, for appointments, that before they fully explained why they were there, they were met with basically, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, here is a prescription. Good bye."

I cannot rid myself of the vision of an old friend who was unrecognizable three weeks after entering a nursing home and who died a few days later with infections and dehydration. The public room in which I found her, three days before her death, reeked of urine and people arranged around the wall, strapped into wheel chairs and looking at ...nothing. Two levels of the provincial government deflected my attempts to offer suggestions for simple improvements in their policies, bending privacy regulations to justify their attitudes. Evenry attempt to discuss policy immediately reverted to that one specific case. In case anyone is interested, the suggestions were that inspectors make random trips to nursing homes,that they not advise administration two weeks in advance of the proposed visit, and that they visit the floors on which people live. You can see how that was far too much to ask.

Someone sarcasticly suggested that "they" want to get rid of us to save the pension fund. A shocking statement, but sometimes I wonder.

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Whoops. Spelley sarcastically wrong; must be my age.

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Spot on ma'am, as always. (You two really are very good at this!) The UK RCN just another regulator taken over by the New Fascism, and as with docs, the likely majority of 'doctors' handmaidens'....so sorry, degree qualified nursing professionals....who don't agree with such obscene and evil policies will say and do nothing. Why, the next thing you know, patients will be denied medical and nursing care, potential life saving treatments and surgeries because they decline useless 'vaccines'. Oh wait..... As regards HMs comment re language, indeed this is a crucial part of the ongoing mega-psyops and the long marchers. I see California has just brought in mandatory use of 'birthing people,' in place of mothers, in hospitals with up to $15.000 fines for non compliance. (I haven't checked that isn't a joke but I'd hazard a fair wager......)

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You're right about the slippery slope, beautifully argued, beautifully expressed.

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In the 1950 film "No Way Out" the Black doctor played by Sidney Poitier does not refuse to help an openly racist and hostile patient, even after the racist man tries to kill him. It is so depressing that some people now think that patients they perceive as racist can be refused medical help. Many thanks for this fascinating and brilliant article.

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Thank you! I learn so much from essays such as this one and from reading the accompanying comments.

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Great article even if concerning. We are definitely sliding backward in so many ways. Thanks for all the quotes you used to bring even more meaning to your article. Today we can no longer feel assured that we will have good care at the hands of medical people or educators or the judicial system. :(

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Who exactly are these "racists"? Are not all human beings inclined to favour their own tribe? Are not all humans genetically instilled with the powerful tool of discrimination, like utterly all other animals on the planet? The ability to observe the differences between those things that might do us harm and those that will help in our survival is an essential tool for longevity. The tendency to prefer the company of one's own family, tribe, group is a central component of an organism's survival toolbox. Caplan's stamp of approval for doctors denying treatment to Russians, or this latest DEI "Racist" targeting is simply an inversion of medical ethics designed to allow the woke version of eugenics to take place (discriminate) in the practice of medicine. The simple fact is that we ALL discriminate, but should the refusal to treat "racists" be allowed by those who practice medicine?

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