Catholics, Hippocrates, and Reforming American Medicine

First Things ^ | January 29, 2025 | George Weigel

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I am the odd man out in a family of medical folk…Beyond the family circle, I have many friends practicing the medical arts, including America’s most distinguished psychiatrist, Paul McHugh. I’ve also been blessed by the work of great physicians, whose skills and dedication have gotten me beyond the biblical allotment of “three score years and ten” (Ps. 90:10).

Decades of life with and around doctors, nurses, and other medical practitioners have thus given me a deep regard for American medicine, which I believe to be the best in the world. And it’s precisely that regard that now leads me to a deep concern about the condition of medicine in these United States—which, like the other professions, is beset by the plague of wokery, and by physicians’ cooperation with what Pope St. John Paul II aptly called the “culture of death” in the 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae.

American medicine and American medical education are in need of serious reform. Getting the federal government’s healthcare agencies out of the DEI swamps and the gender-fluidity wilderness is only a start, welcome as that is. American medicine needs to rediscover its soul and its conscience. Well-catechized Catholic medical professionals are uniquely equipped to aid in that rediscovery. The Catholic Medical Association has a considerable role to play here. So do Catholic chaplains at American medical schools.

Given the wokery at the root of so many of these dysfunctions in American medicine—a tyranny enforced by cancel culture—Catholic medical reformers will need a lot of courage, as well as patience, tactical savvy, and impeccable scientific credentials. But then, courage is one of the four cardinal virtues, isn’t it?