This morning, the Pope celebrates a mass at Jamili Hospital in Rome, on the occasion of the inauguration of the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery. For President Franco Agnelli, “a way to get around the university’s values in times of pandemic and re-emphasize the importance of the doctor-patient relationship.”
Michel Raviart – Vatican
Respect 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 (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore), founded in 1961 by Father Agostino Gimelli. Sixty years Pope Francis will remember this morning, at the Mass he will preside at the Gemelli Polyclinic. The rector of the university, Professor Franco Agnelli, who will receive the pope, explains to Vatican News the expectations for this particularly important event, almost two years after the start of the pandemic.
Rector Agnelli, what is the expectation of the Catholic University for the visit of Pope Francis?
We are preparing with great anticipation. The Holy Father is coming to celebrate Mass and it is an important moment, not only because of the celebration, but because it gives us all an opportunity to pause for a moment and gather around the words of Pope Francis. Hoping that time would help us, we made the plaza in front of the Biological Institutes to celebrate Mass, so that a large number of attendees, we imagine about two thousand, could. It would be a way to get to know each other, to meet on an important occasion, and not just to celebrate a very important day, the day that has been 60 years in the presence of Saint John XXIII. It will be a very important meeting occasion, especially after the period we have lived. I think it’s the biggest choral event in recent years, which we can safely celebrate because we’ve observed all the precautions and because people have taken measures to protect themselves from the pandemic and they want to get back together. It’s a way to get around our values.
What kind of relationship did the medical school have with the popes?
If you look at the speeches given at the inauguration – there was the ruling pope and the one who would ascend to the throne soon after, because then Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini was also present – it was a relationship of constant interest and presence. On the occasion of this celebration, everyone immediately recognized and realized the idealistic meaning of the establishment of the Faculty of Medicine of the Catholic University. It meant seeing an approach to medical practice and research in medicine, education and practice inspired by and shaped by the values that define us. There is a phrase written by Montini in which he says that a patient in our hospital goes in search of the “meaning and cure” of his illness. Now, treatment is sought in all hospitals, to search for meaning for sickness, which is the big question that all people face when they get sick, well, maybe that’s a little more characteristic of a Catholic hospital.
What was the relationship between medical school and the popes?
If you look at the speeches given at the inauguration – there was the ruling pope and the one who would ascend to the throne soon after, because then Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini was also present – it was a relationship of constant interest and presence. On the occasion of this celebration, everyone immediately recognized and realized the idealistic meaning of the establishment of the Faculty of Medicine of the Catholic University. It meant seeing an approach to medical practice and research in medicine, education and practice inspired by and shaped by the values that define us. There is a phrase written by Montini in which he says that a patient in our hospital goes in search of the “meaning and cure” of his illness. Now, treatment is sought in all hospitals, to search for meaning for sickness, which is the big question that all people face when they get sick, well, maybe that’s a little more characteristic of a Catholic hospital.
Without forgetting the character of Father Jamili, from whom this intuition was born…
Of course he is a doctor. He graduated in medicine in Pavia in the context of an ideally positive scientific research. He was a psychiatrist, and at one point he recognized and felt very strongly the relational dimension of medical practice, meaning the relationship with the patient, and wanted the Gemelli-trained physician to witness this approach. He is one of the pioneers of the scientific method in psychological questions.
In these 60 years, how have these values been linked to medical research and innovation?
Certainly, medicine has changed dramatically over time and it is necessary to constantly rethink and redefine the role of the physician as a man and the relationship between him and the patient as a subjective one. It is very easy to fall into a very oriented drift towards therapy and medicine as a technology, understood not only as a mechanistic technique – there are highly refined and developed techniques today – but also as a modular and formal procedural approach to therapy. The humanization of medicine requires a strong restoration of the dimension of the physician’s role, not only as a subject applying a protocol, dealing with technological tools or administering particularly advanced medicines, but also, at the level of professional work, recovering in putting first the patient-person safety approach in the face of specialization, useful Very, sometimes it is provided inevitably, but it leads to a fragmentation of the approach and, accordingly, sometimes to the view of individual diseases rather than the complex clinical picture. It is an outstanding technical issue of approaching the patient, which can also be solved by implementing special models of hospital organization, which simultaneously carry several competencies around the same patient, but on the other hand with the need to always remember the person of the patient, who cannot be approached Once you attend the results of clinical or diagnostic imaging tests, and therefore it is necessary to remember that these x-rays, that set of numbers, from computer projections represent a human person.
This approach is also essential in training future physicians and college students. For example, among the texts required for admission, there is also Laudato si ‘, with its integral human development …
The upbringing of people comes not only from the texts entrusted to them as a guide, but also from the climate, from the air they breathe daily, from the example they receive from their teachers. This is especially true in a medical school where teaching, especially in the later years of the profession, is not done by placing a chair between the professor and the students, but within the hospital, and thus more clearly as an example. During a visit to our university, the Holy Father said that we should teach by example and only if necessary with words. Sometimes this is not possible, I would say that in medicine, there is a chance.
