The Cheerful Oncologist has departed the Internet, no doubt for happier shores. His absence has been profoundly felt though, perhaps nowhere more so than among his fellow colleagues in oncology. Bereft though we have been of the C.O.’s wisdom, it is true that vita contin git, vive com eo. While awaiting his return, I pen my own stories of hope from another world far away from the C.O.’s own. Here in Singapore, these tales are inevitably coloured very differently from those of our admirable colleagues in the United States of America. One is nonetheless reminded of Osler’s words about the solidarity of physicians.
Of no other profession is the word universal applicable in the same sense. The celebrated phrase used of the Catholic Church is in truth much more appropriate when applied to medicine. It is not the prevalence of disease or the existence everywhere of special groups of men to treat it that betokens this solidarity, but it is the identity throughout the civilized world of our ambitions, our methods and our work… To prevent disease, to relieve suffering and to heal the sick – this is our work. The profession in truth is a sort of guild or brotherhood, any member of which can take up his calling in any part of the world and find brethen whose language and methods and whose aims and ways are identical with his own.
