Change your attitude! How much and how many times physicians’ empathy for patient’s pain reshaped medicine (and surgery)

Abstract

In this paper, I try to reconstruct and revive some historical events that illustrate how much empathy, taking patients’ pain and suffering seriously, and trying to eliminate or reduce such sufferings, were not at all irrelevant and superfluous do-goodism on the part of the doctor or researcher. On the contrary, they often offered the key to addressing and solving problems that appeared to be unsolvable until that moment. Six key figures and facts of 19th and 20th-century medicine and surgery emerge here: the invention of surgical anesthesia; the first woman doctor of modern times; the rise of plastic surgery; the introduction of pacemakers in cardiac surgery; and the two founders of the hospice movement and pain medicine. As far and diverse as these revolutionary topics can look, a common thread unites them: a special sensitivity to the patient’s pain. And that sensitivity historically proved to be highly fruitful also scientifically and technically.