Dear PostModern Gandhiji:
A decade ago, when I was a first-year medical student, I worried that modern medicine and pharmacology were based on animal products. I had been raised in a strictly vegetarian Jain household and had been taught to respect all living things. Thus seeing monkeys and dogs in cages used for experiments and dissections disturbed my belief system.
Fast forward to 2020. First the good news: physician training in American medical schools no longer requires animal dissection. But with the tragic coronavirus pandemic, my old concern about animals seems quite trivial. It seems that we should do anything and everything to save humans from suffering.
Because I practice sports medicine, I’m not with the frontline of clinicians tending to those with COVID-19. As such, I’ve been struggling to understand what Gandhiji would be doing if he were alive today. What should I be doing?
Dear Friend:
Here are a couple of quotes from Gandhiji that you might find of value. My own sense-making of Gandhian principles follow the quotes.
“There is a divine purpose behind every physical calamity.”
“I do not want my house to be walled in all sides, and my windows to be closed. Instead, I want cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet.” (M. K. Gandhi)
Thank you for this opportunity to consider Gandhiji’s response to the coronavirus. I imagine that he would have taken a multi-disciplinary approach.
Young Mohandas Gandhi had been both a trained and untrained nurse. As a child, he had tended to his ill father by sitting at his bedside and perhaps massaging his father’s head and legs. As a young man returning to India at the end of the 19th century, he confronted the Bubonic Plague and served his brother-in-law; while the ayurvedic treatments could not save his sister’s husband, he learned something about himself: “my aptitude for nursing gradually developed into a passion.” He famously used this aptitude for the healing profession during the Boer War in South Africa as the founder of the Indian Ambulance Corps. And through the rest of his life, he nursed himself through many fasts and served those with serious illnesses. His patients ranged from his wife and other immediate family to members of his ashrams and lepers whose stigmatized condition he championed. I recall this medical biography to suggest that, as a man of science, Gandhiji would have surely been at the frontline today serving COVID-19 patients in the ER or the ICU.
But Gandhiji understood that science has its limits. He wrote, “To state the limitation of science is not to belittle it.” I imagine that he would have recognized this crisis as an opportunity to head off larger crises. To be sure, he would have used his political talent to support organizations like W.H.O. to mitigate the socio-economic risks of future pandemics. But I believe that Gandhiji’s greatness lies in his multi-generational vision for humanity. The earth – all of it, and all of its creatures – was a Gandhian home. Not only would Gandhiji have directly faced the respiratory challenges of the coronavirus, but he, also, would have used the present danger to open windows and minds to confront even greater ecological, social, and spiritual catastrophes like climate change, enduring inequality, and cruelty to animals.
Using his tools of satyagraha, swaraj, sarvodaya, and ahimsa, Gandhiji would have encouraged us to be in satyalogue with each other, in truthtalk, about what we’ve learned about ourselves and each other during this pandemic.
Regarding your question about what you should be doing, I suggest using all of the gifts bestowed upon you from your religious upbringing and your medical studies; kindly consider how you can use that knowledge for your private spiritual growth and our public universal uplift.
Dr. Rajesh C. Oza has published a compilation of similar Q&A pieces addressing dilemmas that we face in the 21st century. His book Satyalogue // Truthtalk is available on Amazon.