Properly directed praise

A co-worker of mine spent a long time in the hospital and under care of doctors for a very dangerous spinal infection. When she finally came back to work, in a wheelchair, but in good spirits, we were all happy to see her, and I told her so.

She smiled at me and said, "All the glory goes to God!" I am used to these declarations, and I usually don't let on that I think they are preposterous, but I'm sure I let my jaw drop for an unguarded split second before I regained my equanimity.

All the glory to the being who, if it existed, was responsible for the disease in the first place. No thanks to the tireless efforts of the medical professionals who saved her life.

I am going to quote, probably at too great length, the reaction of Daniel Dennett to a similar life or death situation.

To whom, then, do I owe a debt of gratitude? To the cardiologist who has kept me alive and ticking for years, and who swiftly and confidently rejected the original diagnosis of nothing worse than pneumonia. To the surgeons, neurologists, anesthesiologists, and the perfusionist, who kept my systems going for many hours under daunting circumstances. To the dozen or so physician assistants, and to nurses and physical therapists and X-ray technicians and a small army of phlebotomists so deft that you hardly know they are drawing your blood, and the people who brought the meals, kept my room clean, did the mountains of laundry generated by such a messy case, wheel-chaired me to X-ray, and so forth. These people came from Uganda, Kenya, Liberia, Haiti, the Philippines, Croatia, Russia, China, Korea, India--and the United States, of course--and I have never seen more impressive mutual respect, as they helped each other out and checked each other's work. But for all their teamwork, this local gang could not have done their jobs without the huge background of contributions from others. I remember with gratitude my late friend and Tufts colleague, physicist Allan Cormack, who shared the Nobel Prize for his invention of the c-t scanner. Allan--you have posthumously saved yet another life, but who's counting? The world is better for the work you did. Thank goodness. Then there is the whole system of medicine, both the science and the technology, without which the best-intentioned efforts of individuals would be roughly useless. So I am grateful to the editorial boards and referees, past and present, of Science, Nature, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, and all the other institutions of science and medicine that keep churning out improvements, detecting and correcting flaws.

("Thank Goodness", Copyright 2006 by Edge Foundation, Inc.)

Let's give credit where credit is due.