60 years of Medicine at the Cattolica. Rings: make sense and remedy the disease

Michele Raviart – Vatican City

Respect for the patient as a person without giving up research and technology. This is the approach that has always guided the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, born in 1961 from an intuition of Father Agostino Gemelli. Sixty years that will be remembered this morning by Pope Francis, in the mass he will preside at the Gemelli Polyclinic. The rector of the University, Professor Franco Anelli, who will welcome the Pope, tells Vatican News the expectation for this particularly significant event almost two years after the start of the pandemic.

Rector Anelli, how do you live the expectation of this visit from Pope Francis at the Catholic University?

We are preparing with great anticipation. The Holy Father will come to celebrate a Mass and it is an important moment, not only for the celebration, but because it offers everyone the opportunity to stop for a moment and gather around the words of Pope Francis. Hoping that time will assist us, we have prepared the square in front of the biological institutes for the celebration of Mass, so many people will be able to attend, we imagine about two thousand. It will be a way to recognize each other, to reunite on an important occasion and not only for the memory of a very significant day, that of 60 years ago in the presence of St. John XXIII. It will be a very important opportunity to meet, especially after the period we have spent. I believe it is the biggest choral event in recent years, which we can carry out safely because we have observed all the precautions and because people have made sure to protect themselves from the pandemic and want to get back together. It is a way of gathering around our values.

What was the relationship between the Faculty of Medicine and the Popes?

If you go to see the speeches made on the occasion of the inauguration – there was a reigning Pope and one who would rise to the throne soon after because the then Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini was also present – it was a relationship of constant attention and presence . Already on the occasion of that celebration, everyone grasped and were immediately aware of the ideal meaning that the establishment of a Faculty of Medicine in the Cattolica had. It meant witnessing an approach to medical practice, scientific research in the medical field, education and practice that were inspired and conformed by the values ​​that characterize us. There is a phrase from Montini in which he says that the patient in our hospital goes to seek “meaning and remedy” for his illness. Now, the remedy is sought in all hospitals, to go and look for a meaning to the disease, which is the big question that all people have when they get sick, well this is perhaps a little more characteristic of a Catholic hospital.

Without forgetting the figure of Father Gemelli from which this intuition was born …

Of course, he is a doctor. He graduated in medicine in Pavia in an ideally positivist scientific research context. He was a psychologist and at a certain point he grasps and feels very strongly the relational dimension of medical practice, in the sense of the relationship with the patient, and he wants the doctor who is trained in Gemini to be a witness of this approach. He is one of the pioneers of the scientific approach to psychological issues.

In these 60 years, how have these values ​​been related to medical research and innovation?

Certainly medicine has changed enormously over time and there is a need for constant rethinking and redefining the role of the doctor as a man and the relationship between him and the patient as an intersubjective relationship. It is very easy to slip into a drift very oriented towards treatment and medicine as a technique, understood not only as mechanical technology – today there are technologies of great refinement and sophistication – but also as a stereotyped and formal procedural approach to treatment. The humanization of medicine requires a strong recovery of the dimension of the doctor’s role not only as a subject who applies a protocol or operates technological tools or administers particularly advanced drugs, but who first of all recovers the approach to integrity on the level of professional action. of the person of the patient with respect to a specialization, very useful, sometimes inevitably salvific, but which leads to a fragmentation of the approach and therefore sometimes to see the single diseases rather than the complex of the clinical picture. This is an eminently technical question of approach to the patient, which also finds a solution in the preparation of specific models of hospital organization, which bring a plurality of competences simultaneously around the patient himself, but on the other hand with the need to always remember the person of the patient, who cannot be approached simply by paying attention to the results of clinical examinations or diagnostic imaging, and therefore we must remember that those radiographs, that set of numbers, of computer projections represent a human person.

This approach is also required in the training of future doctors and students of the Faculty. For example, among the texts that are required for admission, there is also Laudato si ‘, with its integral human development …

The formation of people does not come only from the texts entrusted to them as a guide, but derives from the climate, from the air they breathe every day, from the example that teachers receive. This is particularly true in a Faculty of Medicine where teaching, especially in the more advanced course years, is not done by placing a chair between the teacher and the students, but inside the hospital, therefore in an even more lively way with the shape of the example. On the occasion of a visit that was made by our University, the Holy Father said that we must teach by example and only if necessary with words. Sometimes it is not possible, I would say that in medicine, on the other hand, there is an opportunity.