Adriaen Brouwer’s Bitter Medicine …
“But medicine has a bitter taste in his own arena, which no technological progress can sweeten. In its fight against evil and death, medicine can win a battle but lose the war. The disease that seems to be beaten, rises embodied in new, more powerful figures, like an evil alien in some science fiction horror movie. A physician or a nurse needs to swallow this reality without too many grimaces, and face the idea that the cure of the sick emerges for the ability of take care of a diseased man or woman, even in front of failure and death.
This means, in our work, trying to heal with every human effort, but at the same time holding the idea that salubrity and salvation (which have their common root in the latin word salus) are not mechanical products of progress and science, so avoiding the need to have in our hands the happiness of humankind.”
read all of Borodin’s commentary in Journal of Medicine and the Person