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AN IDEALISTIC IDEOLOGUE SPEAKS
A Postgraduate’s Reflections on Chee Yam Cheng’s Speech at the NUS 1999 Convocation held for Medical and Dental Graduates, 19 Sep 99.
The last convocation I had was held 5 years ago, on a hot afternoon pregnant with humidity, heaving with heat. I swayed between dazed wakefulness and semi-stupor: post-call.
This time was different. A paradoxical child-like nonchalance overtook me. Alerted me. That distracting salad of excitement and weariness was not present to toss my attention about this time round. I looked at him and I think he at me briefly, from across the space of years, wisdom and wars. He really looked quite small onstage, but I felt smaller.
I have had heard more than a doctor’s fair share of medical-related speeches. Some mumbled through with sagacious intent yet came across dark and clueless like a black and bad cloud. Some slithered cleverly past like a serpent through lalang, avoiding the issues that both may cut the speaker and yet needed to be cut. And yet some took the bull by the horns and seized the day. There aren’t many like those. To my mind, I remember the venerable Dr Wong Heck Sing in a SMA Lecture some time back as one such speaker. A MP-doctor outside his house on a starry night was also one.
He. He was definitely another.
And he spoke. Rapid but not in haste, global yet not cursory: a doctor to the last, in thought and in speech. No words like “buy-in, synergy, dovetail, calibration, strategic alliance, mission statement, leverage” etc that a charlatan might proffer to the young and ignorant. Such words are when the hearer knows little and the speaker knows less. No engineer telling another profession that they cannot cooperate amongst themselves. No empty homilies, exhortations and pleasantries born out of the fount of an indifferent speechwriter’s pen. He spoke as he wrote and he wrote as he felt. He gave fluent utterance to his heart’s prodding.
He spoke of real-market pay for public sector doctors, or the lack thereof. He spoke of the information explosion, and how not to be consumed by the ensuing conflagration. He spoke of genes: the delicate line that divided the Human Genome Project as a plague and as an epiphany.
And then, as always, the best is indeed yet to be, he saved the best for the last. He spoke against the commercialisation of medicine. Sedulous in conviction, persuasive in authority and embracing in completeness, he explained why it must be and declared on behalf of medicine the war against commercialism. He painted the skirmishes we are fighting, the battles that surely follow, the casualties we should avoid, and the victory we have to secure.
The air felt thinner as he went on and higher. Above and beyond soulless administrators and bureaucrats offering a mission, a strategy and a plan, he had an ideology to share. Because an ideology separates the man from the boy, the leader from the administrator, the visionary from the planner.
I silently prayed the bleary-eyed housemen behind me understood the painstaking intent of his speech so manifest in his choice of words. Or were they dozing off as I once did?
And visions of Wong Heck Sing came to me again. And Surgery’s Jimmy Choo and Low Cheng Hock and Paediatrics’ Wong Hock Boon and Tan Cheng Lim, amongst others. A bit of Medicine’s William Chew and Orthopaedics’ Balasubramaniam here and there. And the voices of Ransome, Mekie and Seah Cheng Siang which I have never had the fortune to hear but sometimes dream about. Very soon, the young doctors of the future will have even fewer and fewer of such men to hear, and be instructed and inspired by. My generation still has a few. Soon there may be none. I looked to the ceiling of Kallang Theatre and scanned the concrete firmament: the pantheon of current so-called leaders of the profession. Many are leaders in skill but not in heart, in wallet but not in will. In this darkening age where sycophancy is prized and naked greed is encouraged and rewarded, we no longer have a milieu that produces Ransome, Mekie and the like. He may well be truly the last of them. It is nice to see him come full circle and be once again so at home in the wilderness. He actually reminds me of one of the Liang Shan characters, Lin Chong in the all-time Chinese classic, Water Margin.
An idealistic ideologue in a world largely bereft of idealism and ideology, he is as I had last called him some months ago, the last of the great Jedi warriors of the profession, the Obi-wan Kenobi of doctors. Will there be another? Perhaps we should think of ourselves now as the most precarious of professions rather than the noblest of professions.
The convocation ended a while later. I looked around at the paper canisters we held which contained our MMed Degrees. They looked quite small and unimportant.
The Hobbit