How do we save our honor?

Hospital that I work at runs private clinics. These are clinics where patients pay substantially larger sum of money than the general clinics to see a doctor. They are given a private room, attention from a fully qualified doctor and a personalized setup. All the revenues generated from this goes to the hospital’s charity which funds the cost for patients who cannot afford  care. I was asked to join this clinic. I will be spending 2 hours a week in these clinics. It started last week.

As I was waiting for my patient to come in, a man peeked in. He asked me if I would be able to see his neonate because the pediatrician had not arrived yet. The child was not eating well, he said. I am also a doctor, he declared. He said, he could have taken his child to the emergency room but he was worried about getting infection from that chaos. I agreed. But I told him I am an endocrinologist, I have no skills to evaluate or treat an ill child more than what he probably knows. In a typical pushy manner that I encounter in general clinics from people with some authority and recognition but perhaps also a desperate father bothered by child’s illness, he perseverated if I could still see his child. I said no.

The character in J M Coetzee’s book Diary of a Bad Year deliberates about the US administration’s involvement in torture of captured terror suspects:

Their shamelessness is quite extraordinary. Their denials are less than half-hearted. The distinction their hired lawyers draw between torture and coercion is patently insincere, pro forma. In the new dispensation we have created, they implicitly say, the old powers of shame have been abolished. Whatever abhorrence you may feel counts for nothing. You cannot touch us, we are too powerful. 

Demosthenes: Whereas the slave fears only pain, what the free man fears most is shame. If we grant the truth of what the New Yorker claims, then the issue for individual Americans becomes a moral one: how, in the face of this shame to which I am subjected, do I behave? How do I save my honour?

We doctors also work in a shame. We are scared to take our own child to where we treat other’s children. I cannot imagine of asking my parents to wait in line at our hospital to get a ticket to see a doctor at the general clinic, I would have failed as a son if that situation comes.

The question then becomes glaring to us: How, in the face of this shame to which we are subjected, do we behave? How do we save our honor?