Chapter 20: A Medical Practice Enhanced by Explorations in History, Religion, and Spirituality
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Description
In response to a question about the link between professional practice and spiritual/religious belief, Dr. Pollock explains his belief that human intelligence is an organic, collective entity “that is getting smarter all the time.” In his small way, he has tried to contribute to that growth and he comments on his own evolution as a person over his lifetime. He also explains that his interest in European and Jewish history had fed a more general fascination with how people have coped historically with extreme circumstances and emergencies. His reading on the experiences of immigrants, Holocaust victims and other groups has made him a more sensitive cancer physician.
Identifier
PollokRE_03_20121119-C20
Publication Date
11-19-2012
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Raphael Pollock, MD, Oral History Interview, November 19, 2012
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Character and Personal Philosophy Personal BackgroundCharacter, Values, Beliefs, TalentsProfessional Values, Ethics, PurposeFaithInspirations to Practice Science/MedicineInfluences from People and Life ExperiencesProfessional Practice The Professional at Work
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I was curious. You mentioned your Jewish heritage and also quoted St. Francis. I was just wondering if spirituality or religious beliefs play any part in this practice of listening that flows through your leadership style and also your teaching style and your style in the clinic?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Well, I don’t think that anyone would mistake me for a religious person. I do not attend religious services on a regular basis at all. I can only paraphrase a quotation from Einstein, who was also not a particularly religious person; although he was born Jewish but was not an observant Jew. And I’m not an observant Jew per se. But to paraphrase him, he was asked once, “What is your definition of God?” and he said, “God is the embodiment of the creative intelligence of all mankind.” So it’s an abstraction, if you will, but what a powerful abstraction that is. And I think that if someone said do I pray to God, I don’t envision someone with a long beard and a shepherd’s crock and a flowing robe that is somewhere up there, but I do see this idea of human intelligence as an organic thing that’s evolving and getting smarter with time. And if we can appeal to that, that to me is, if you will, my spirituality, and part of how I can appeal to that is by using the very, very infinitesimally small, single-grain-of-sand piece of that that is me and apply it to these problems. So that’s— And that, in turn, creates a—helps me create a sense of unity and purpose in my activities and my actions. It provides an organizing basis, if you will. And I find that as I’ve gotten older and I think about that more and more, it enables me to be that much more patient and that much more accepting of the shortcomings of myself and people around me. I think I’ve become easier to be around and a nicer person to be around, which is part of why, just as an aside, I’m really not that upset about what happened with being removed from that position. I see and forgive the shortcomings of people around me. I get angry at times when I think about this vis-à-vis the things that I wanted to do that I won’t be able to do now, but I also accept the reality that if we think about this from the point of view of our collective intelligence, there are other really smart people here and they’ll figure that out. And my door is always open if they ever want to come and talk to me about the things that I hadn’t accomplished that I wanted to, and then they can rifle through that list and parse it as they see fit and pick up some of those themes. They’ll think of things that I didn’t think of, and that’s how this massive creative intelligence can really be brought to bear. Does that—? That’s my religion, if you will.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah. It answers the question very well. I just kind of, as we’ve been talking, have been seeing such a kind of integrated approach to very different problems, and since you had pulled these different quotations out at key times, I just wanted to ask the question. It’s normally a question I ask of people, and I get a whole range of responses. So, yeah, it did answer my question. I can see there’s a sense of practice that’s connected to kind of a larger view. It makes a lot of sense to me.
Raphael Pollock, MD:
I guess if someone were to look at me or ask me, the religion is not per se the critical thing, but as sort of one of my avocational interests, I’ve been very interested in European history and Jewish history and how that fits in. On my father’s family side, it was a Holocaust survivor family. How people cope with extreme circumstances and extreme emergencies, if you will— I’ve been a fan with overarching interests in history since childhood, and I avocationally still deeply enjoy reading history and also biographies because reading biography, you get so much knowledge about how people cope with situations—how they deal with adversity, the psychology of how to handle circumstances and situations. To me, these are some of the things that I extract from that type of study. I’m tremendously, and remain tremendously, impressed with what the immigrant generation from 1880-1920 that came to this country—the Pole, the Italians, the Jews, the Germans, the Irish—how they were able to buck tremendous prejudice. We can’t even conceive of how bad it was and what they were able to accomplish. Not that I believe in everything that Israel, for example, has done or is doing, but when I visit and actually spend extended periods of time, I’m tremendously impressed with what has been accomplished over the course of a seventy-year period of time by a group of people who were absolutely persecuted and homeless and literally not wanted anywhere in the world. So seeing how people cope with these situations and how they do what they did I think in some ways has made me a more sensitive and caring cancer physician. It’s a different type of coping that I’m trying to help people with, but it’s a coping nonetheless
Recommended Citation
Pollock, Raphael E. MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 20: A Medical Practice Enhanced by Explorations in History, Religion, and Spirituality" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1332.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1332
Conditions Governing Access
Open
