History: Personal, Professional, National
By
Leonard Zwelling
In The Wall Street Journal on September 6, the great Peggy Noonan uses the publication of a new volume of posthumous essays by the historian David McCullough as a starting point to dig into why history is so important, especially at a time of political turbulence, like the one we live in now.
Here are some of the lines she quotes from the book:
“History shows us how to believe. History teaches, reinforces what we believe in, what we stand for, and what we ought to be willing to stand up for.”
History defines our principles.
“At their core, the lessons of history are largely lessons of appreciation.”
We should be grateful for the lessons of history and for those who came before us.
“Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude.”
It is unwise to ignore the lessons of history. You’ll repeat the same mistakes. It’s also bad manners.
“What history teaches, it teaches mainly by example.”
Both positive and negative lessons are available in the stories of the people in history.
“There’s no one who hasn’t an ancestor who went through some form of hell.”
A common theme of history is that those in our past have dealt with adversity. The overcoming of that adversity may be what allows us to enjoy what we have today.
Knowing history, “is an extension of life. It both enlarges and intensifies the experience of being alive.”
We cannot fully live without a knowledge of the past. To be in the moment today, you must understand the moments of yesterday.
How does this apply to our personal, professional, and national lives at this moment?
The principles learned from your family are the ones that guide you for the rest of your life. These lead to your appreciation of what is important. Your family history will affect how you behave. Your parents and the rest of your family serve as examples of your behavior and any history of adversity is passed down as a means of instilling resilience in us by showing us the resilience of our ancestors. After all, isn’t that what we learn about on Easter and Passover, suffering and redemption? Our families also teach us how to experience life itself. Our view of the world, our place in it, and the appreciation of others comes from our families and the history they bring to our childhood and beyond. What our families gave us yesterday allows us to make the choices we do today.
What that means is that each of us carries the responsibility to try to pass down the lessons of our ancestors as we use these very lessons ourselves in guiding how we live and where we live.
The same ought to be true of our professional lives, especially as physicians and academics. As we train, we learn the Hippocratic principles as well as those of modern science. In today’s healthcare-industrial complex, some of these seem to be getting lost in the rush to see a new patient every fifteen minutes and publish as many papers as possible. These behaviors are inconsistent with the lessons I learned yesterday when I trained.
There are very few emotions that I hold more deeply than the gratitude to Duke Medical School for teaching me how to think like a doctor and the Duke Department of Medicine for surrounding me with physician-scientists making it unlikely that I would be anything else. Duke also reminded each of us of the challenges of those who came before us from Dr. Wilbur Davison who started Duke Medical School and whose name is on the main med school building to Dr. Eugene Stead’s starting every piece of advice by stating, “just say for me..” and usually ending with “what this patient needs is a doctor.” And living giants who taught us were the examples we strove to emulate. For me, there were too many to count, but I treasure them all.
Despite this great environment there were the remnants of adversity from the segregated Duke Hospital wards that were not integrated until the 1960s to the tacit assumption that no matter how tired you were, you were expected to have all six new patient admissions worked-up and memorized by the following morning. Despite your exhaustion as an intern, you also knew you were alive because you had ascended slowly toward competence as an internist and in that fulfilled your life’s desire to become a real doctor. In hindsight, I realize that I could only make a difference in a patient’s life because of those who made a difference in my life.
In our national life, the lessons of history are being largely ignored at our own peril. As a nation, we seem to have no principles at all. Our immigration policy is one of cruelty and our legislative and judicial branches are characterized by ineptitude and indifference. Rather than be grateful for those who came before them, the current leadership and staff in the White House scorn those who came before claiming to be the best that ever was. Let history decide that, Mr. Trump. Our president believes he invented excellence yet surrounds himself with the incompetent. Trump 2.0 seems to be forgetting the adversity of past administrations, including Trump 1.0’s Covid challenge and the triumph of Operation Warp Speed in the face of massive adversity. Now, Mr. Trump has installed a scientific skeptic as the current Secretary of HHS suggesting the President did not understand the origins of the good he did in his first term. As for reinvigorating the vibrance of American life, Mr. Trump has instead instilled resentment as a major driver of political power even as the number of new jobs plummets due to his stumbling and ill-conceived leadership of the economy. He has not made America great again. Rather, he’s diminished us because he has no understanding of who we really are and always were.
In summary, ignoring the history of your family, the history of those who preceded you in your profession, and your own country’s national story is a very poor strategy for success and happiness. I see examples of such ignorance of all three all around me. It saddens me greatly when individuals forget the great distance their families have traveled to get where they are today. Young doctors forget why they chose their profession as they burnout in a sea of boredom, overwork, and the electronic medical record. And our national leaders have forgotten the guiding principles of our own Declaration of Independence and Constitution—rebellion over royalty and three co-equal branches of government with the Congress being the most representative and important. There is nothing in Article One that suggests Congress ought to be a rubber stamp for the chief executive.
Family, professional, and national history can get us back on track. Let’s remember where we came from.
