What Medicine Means To Me

[fight4thefuture]

I gave the following speech to 300 students on March 20, 2008; my school is pretty small. It was for the last day of Heal Darfur Week, which I started as a sophomore and have continued ever since. It was inspired by Dr. Hendricks' speech in Atlas Shrugged. I borrow the phrase "excruciating devotion" from him.

"Whenever a crime occurs where there is injury involved, it is the medical community, along with law inforcement, that responds. While law enforcement tries to prevent such crimes from happening, the medical community attempts to reverse those that have already occurred. What took the aggressor seconds to do in a mindles rage, takes the physician what could be hours of excruciating devotion to reverse.

We are the undoers.

We are the healers.

We are the fixers.

We take the broken and we mend it.

We take the stolen and we return it.

We take the destroyed and we recreate it.

The medical field is a field of justice. I like to call it natural justice. We will be making sure that the victims are not consigned to the death penalty--death by gunshot, death by stabbing, death by murder. We will not always be successful, but we will have tried.

I can think of no better way to introduce you all to Dr. Jerry Ehrlich, who, as a member of Doctor's Without Borders, has witnessed the climax of what we are up against, in Darfur and the rest of the world. It is a struggle between those who hurt and those who heal."

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Julian,

I just saw this. Very sorry for the delay.

I moved it from Articles to here since it is not a full-blown article.

For your information, all new threads posted to the Articles forum are automatically moderated. We had to do this because new threads in that section appear on the front page. During a time, there were many incomplete and unpolished posts being made and the front page was looking too amateurish for comfort.

As to the introduction you gave, nice.

Michael

[Chris Grieb]

Julian; Well done!

You are very eloquent for one so young.

[fight4thefuture]

I moved it from Articles to here since it is not a full-blown article.

Thanks, Michael. I thought something was up so I re-posted it on my blog along with some corrections. I'll host my writings there for now on.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Julian,

That's always a good idea because it is your thing, your rules and you don't depend on anyone else. However, feel free to post anything you want to on OL. There are only 2 or 3 threads that are automatically moderated like that (Articles and some things in the Corner Office). If you had posted initially in this thread, for instance (which is for discussing anything and everything), it would have appeared instantly.

In fact, if you have something you write you are really proud of, there is nothing at all wrong with having it at more than one place. It is never too early to start building a reputation.

Michael