"I quit when medicine was placed under State control some years ago," said Dr. Hendricks. "Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I could not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything-except the desires of the doctors.
Men considered only the 'welfare' of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, but 'to serve.' That a man's willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards-never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness at which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind-yet what is it they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in the operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it-and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn't."
A Canadian M.D.? British, perhaps?
Neither -- Dr. Hendricks spoke those words after dinner in the home of Midas Mulligan, on page 744 of "Atlas Shrugged", by Ayn Rand -- in 1957.
It can't be argued too strongly -- if you are given to reasoned, rational consideration of things political; if you have a tendency to view government as an operational arm of your charitable impulses -- whatever your stripe, there is something for you in this tome.
"Atlas Shrugged" has been an epiphany of sorts for me. Ayn Rand, the so-called founder of Objectivism, has left us a virtual prophecy of the perils of government taking on the role of Nanny-State. We are guided through a world where man has rejected the 'philosophy' of reason and self-sufficiency and has adopted a new standard of whatever is in the "public good". Government-run corporations: Good, Capitalism: bad. Sound familiar?
If I had to distill this book down to a word, I would say: frightening. Second choice: prescient.
Someone noted that I was carrying "Atlas Shrugged" with me in a waiting room recently. After confessing that he hadn't read it since college, I heartily recommended that he pick it up and dust it off for a fresh read.
Same to you.
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