Applying the Liberal Arts

A few nights ago, I had coffee with one of my best friends, who has recently begun working in the healthcare industry.  I met her at my liberal arts university and got to know her between reading assignments of Homer and Rousseau. As a philosophy and government major, the classic curriculum of our liberal arts core coincided exactly with what I am the most interested in.

As I slogged through our drier texts, however, I sometimes wondered what masochistic impulse led my friend to wrestle with difficult books that seemed unrelated to her future profession. After all, she would be perfectly equipped for her career simply by learning the contemporary healthcare practices taught in her nursing classes.

Our last conversation, like many others we’ve had, reminded me why she did. People who work in hospitals watch a lot of people die. More difficult than this, even, is watching the power struggles and decision-making that takes place when those in a comatose state are in the hands of their family members. My friend described to me how hard it is to watch people make excruciating decisions for their loved ones and the shockingly slow and agonizing way we allow many people to wither away on life support.

It doesn’t take a woman educated in the liberal arts to recognize just how sad it is to hold a patient’s hand as that patient lays, comatose and alone, with death arriving on schedule. But my friend’s knowledge of philosophy and the history of Western Civilization helped her to understand this tragedy as a part of a greater social problem. People are woefully unprepared to make quality of life decisions for other people or even for themselves. With the advance of modern medicine, we’ve achieved the control we wanted over disease and disability, our natural enemies, but we’ve acquired a responsibility for and power over ourselves and others that leaves us terrified and anxious. The families of the dying are forced to make decisions that no person should be expected to make.

I’m not sure if studying the liberal arts made my friend reflective or if she decided to study the liberal arts because of her reflective nature. What I do know is that she’s a wonderful mix of excellent nursing skills and a deep concern with living well in the twenty-first century. Reading and writing with her about the great thinkers who came before equipped us to live our lives better, no matter how different our future careers may be.