The Canceled HMS Panel Is a Failure of Empathy

Last week at Harvard Medical School, three pediatric patients from Gaza were prevented from speaking at a student event.

As medical students, we learn to take responsibility for the health of others. This privilege requires a commitment that we care for the lives and wellbeing of all patients and all people. The silence of our medical communities on the inconceivable violence, morbidity, and mortality facing Palestinian people is irreconcilable with this responsibility for empathy in medicine.

One year ago, I found myself lying on the HMS quad in a barely worn white coat. My peers and I were participating in a “die-in” to protest the violence enacted upon the people of Gaza. A speaker read out a long list of names: children who had been killed by bombings just that week.

My classmates and I have spent the past year studying physiology and pathology, the science of how our bodies work and how they break. We are stepping into a community of scientists and caregivers whose life’s work is the health and wellbeing of others. Central is the premise that life, health, and freedom from suffering are sacred.

In the same year, we have watched — on our screens, from across the world — the indiscriminate decimation of the lives and wellbeing of an entire population. Over the last 16 months, nearly 50,000 people in Gaza have been killed, more than 100,000 have been injured, and over 10,000 are missing.

In an address to the UN Security Council nearly one year ago, the secretary general of Doctors Without Borders said: “We have watched our patients and colleagues be killed and maimed. This situation is the culmination of a war Israel is waging on the entire population of the Gaza Strip — a war of collective punishment, a war without rules, a war at all costs.”

Medical and academic institutions have remained largely silent. At Harvard, concerns of censorship and punishment of student protestors are well documented. As we train to join the medical community, we risk becoming students not only of our universities’ teachings, but also their complacency.

Studies have suggested that medical students become less empathetic over the course of their schooling. I find this hard to fathom. When you learn exactly how a body can be crushed, how a blast wave can rupture membranes, how organs will struggle and die from starvation or blood loss — when you see patients with chronic pain from injuries, who have been hospitalized with infections that threaten to overtake them, who suffer from the trauma of violence — how could you possibly feel less?

Last week’s cancelled panel was what we call a “patient clinic,” a part of our curriculum at HMS in which patients are invited to share their healthcare stories with students. I remember every patient clinic from my first year. These were the class sessions when everyone put away their computers, stopped studying, sat up straight, and, for an hour, just listened. I think they are meant to protect us from losing our empathy.

One of my best friends is Palestinian American; she is a medical student like me. Growing up, her parents instructed her not to tell anyone she was Palestinian because they wouldn’t treat her equally anymore. Seeing how our schools, hospitals, and communities have responded to the mass killing of Palestinian people — she said it opened her eyes to how many people would see her life as worth less if they knew where she was from.

After the patient clinic last week was cancelled, I learned that the reason from our dean was concerns that hearing only from Palestinian patients and their families would be one-sided and divisive. The patients are 1, 6, and 14 years old.

There is nothing one-sided or divisive in hearing from children who have had to flee their homes to seek safety and care in our hospitals. Censorship at Harvard has silenced patients and children, suggesting that we have long lost the basic principle of valuing the lives and stories of patients equally.

Hippocrates is fabled to have said that “wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity.” The physicians in our hospitals are my teachers; I am astonished by the level of care they show for their patients every day. I want to believe this capacity for care within the medical community can apply to all people.

I ask my peers, teachers, and deans at HMS to live by these principles. Refuse to make exceptions to whose lives and health we value. Reject the idea that any patient’s story or existence could be too political or divisive.

Empathy should be our power — the ability to stand with people in their pain while fighting for their health. Our promise is to value the lives and health of others unequivocally. Our downfall is when we close our eyes, when we stop seeing a patient as we would see ourselves — when we stop viewing lives lost around the world as lives as full as ours.

L. Karina Aguilar is a second-year student at Harvard Medical School.