Employmentweb_low

EMplOyMENt, wOrk, aNd hEalth iNEQualitiES - A GLOBAL PERSPECTIvE
the doctor is a popular hero: you have only to consider how
frequently and easily he is presented as such on television. if his
training were not so long and expensive, every mother would be
happy for her son to become a doctor. it is the most idealised of all
the professions. Yet it is idealised abstractly. some of the young who
decide to become doctors are at first influenced by this ideal. but i
would suggest that one of the fundamental reasons why many
doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when
the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the
value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. this is not
because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they
live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a
human life is worth.
it cannot afford to. if it did, it would either have to dismiss this
knowledge and with it dismiss its pretences to democracy and
become totalitarian: or it would have to take account of this
knowledge and revolutionise itself. either way it would be
transformed.
i do not claim to know what a human life is worth. there can be
no final or personal answer. the question is social. An individual
cannot answer it for himself. the answer resides within the totality
of relations which can exist within a certain social structure at a
certain time. Finally man's worth to himself is expressed by his
treatment of himself.
but since social development is dialectical and there is often a
contradiction between the existing social relations and what is
becoming possible, one can sometimes perceive that the existing
answer is inadequate.
this book challenges us to find another answer to the question:
What is a human life worth And this, i believe, can only be done by
envisaging and actively claiming a future very different from the one
being prepared.
John Berger
drawings by yves Berger
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