Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 18, 1994 TAG: 9412200053
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: G-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by SIDNEY BARRITT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
David Hilfiker established his credentials as a physician-author with "Healing the Wounds," an account of his experiences in a remote rural practice in Minnesota.
In 1983, he forsook the pleasures and trials of that life to enter a practice and lifestyle that few others, physicians or otherwise, would choose. Together with wife and three young children, Dr. Hilfiker moved to the violent urban streets of Washington, D.C., not just to practice medicine but also to live in Christ House, a home for otherwise homeless men.
The book is not so much about medicine as it is about class, culture and, most of all, poverty.
The practice of medicine is the lens through which poverty is viewed. Any lens has the capacity to magnify or minimize, to distort, or, best of all, to transmit a startlingly true image. It is undeniable that the author is mainstream, middle-class, well-educated and possessed of countless resources at least when compared to his patients. All of these indelible characteristics affect the lens, too.
He arrived with a sense of vocation - this was his calling. Poverty was more a reflection of injustice, unequal opportunity, for those enmeshed in its coils. That notion came under siege. He found that even when provided with opportunity, many of the poor and homeless choose, in a manner of speaking, to remain where they are. Behaviors ingrained are hard to overcome. But some do take the opportunity, perhaps not on the first or second try but more likely on the seventh or 27th.
Why some change and others do not remains a mystery. Triumphs are few and small in scope; defeats are many and often crushing.
Whatever naivete came with him soon disappeared under the burden of practicing "poverty medicine." While his mission remained noble, some of the paths he took en route, some of the things he said, some of the people he turned away from or aside - all were less than noble. His lens is not rose-colored.
Compassion breaks down in the face of fatigue and frustration. He wonders, candidly, when facing his own sense of inadequacy, whether the uncaring public servants he meets aren't really in the same fix. They began with some of the same good motives, only to become numbed and ultimately resentful of those who call on them for aid.
It is difficult to plumb another's motives but the author strikes me as a plainly honest man without a trace of "holier than thou." The book is more a meditation on the condition of the poor than a sermon chastising the rest of us for our lack of caring.
When news of the latest famine, war or other disaster fills the press reports, we sometimes turn away, saying in effect, "We gave last time." Hilfiker spent most of 10 years not turning away and his book is testament to the small miracles that a small committed group can work.
Would that more of us in our own small way could emulate his search for a more equitable distribution of justice in the widest sense of that word.
Sidney Barritt is a Roanoke| physician.
by CNB