Raising a fist, the doctor's slip shows

The usual mental picture anyone has of a doctor is one of amiable reserve. A doctor is not garrulous or showy. There is a quiet friendliness in him or her. Probably because the job requires it, a doctor is not prone to displays of emotion.

I have several doctor friends and relations, and they all hew to this common impression. In the course of my life and my own profession, I have crossed paths with many other doctors who are neither friends not relations. Almost always, they still fall within that description.

But doctors are not always benign personalities. They are, after all, still human beings and human beings can be pushed to a limit beyond which they are capable of shedding preconceived notions.

Thus I have seen, though quite rarely, doctors actually taking action about things they feel very deeply about. I have seen them march in the streets waving placards and wearing black armbands.

Hard to associate with the common perception but true. And perfectly understandable. But as I have said, such displays of emotion are extremely rare. My picture of a doctor remains the same, despite a few notes on the margin.

When the military and police arrested 43 people that included doctors and other health workers in Morong, Rizal while supposedly in the midst of an alleged communist training seminar, my immediate thought was not whether they were communists but whether they were really doctors.

I do not need to satisfy myself on the communist aspect because that is the job of the military and the police. But I needed to be at peace with the thought that those arrested were really health workers.

News reports eventually provided the details and I had to settle into the fact that, by the nature of their calling, doctors and allied medical workers cannot be constrained by limits dictated by social, political and economic realities.

The incident, however, quickly degenerated into a circus, a political issue whipped into a storm by both sides of the ideological divide. Eventually it became almost impossible to fill in the little nooks and crannies in-between. Before long, it was either you were for or against.

It would have been easier to look at the incident in the context of need, to which professional calling and moral imperative dictate must be filled, regardless of station or persuasion of the party in need.

In such a context, it would have been tempting to shrug the shoulders and conclude the arrests were a mistake, and even a great disservice. Why arrest people who are just answering their calling, regardless of who they must minister medical attention to?

But then, just as I was about to move on from branding the arrests a mistake to actually condemning them and subsequent actions as abusive and in breach of legal requirements, some of those arrested suddenly appeared in news photos and footages raising their fists.

Oh no, that is a trademark gesture. That is no longer a doctor simply trying to minister to health needs. That is a doctor already deep in a cause beyond medicine and good health. The slip has shown and shown clearly.

As said earlier, I have seen, though rarely, doctors marching in protest, shouting slogans and angrily raising fists. A fist raised in anger is a fist raised in anger. Nothing more. But a fist raised in stone-cold silence is defiance, defiance as in political smuggery.

I have seen that kind of defiant fist-raising many times — in Muslim terrorists convicted by Indonesian courts, in Philippine military renegades involved in coup plots, and almost always in captured communist rebels.

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