Dr Lydia Cairncross

Thank you for this chance to share my thoughts with you.

You graduate at the end of a year in which the national student movement has shaken the very foundations of higher education. Challenging not just the commodification of learning and teaching but also the hierarchies and opaque forms of power that characterize universities. With that, the mask of the transformed new South Africa is being torn down and the unjust, unequal and painfully racist reality of our South Africa is being revealed. Following in the footsteps of youth throughout the ages, this generation of students is speaking truth and acting change. No matter what your political position may be, no student, or anyone else for that matter, can remain untouched by this moment in history.

And you are graduating as doctors!  This means that you stand at the interface between individual and collective rights. Your skills and knowledge and your life are yours, yes, but they are also held in service for all humankind.

For the next few years all of you will work the corridors of our public hospitals, treating the poorest of the poor. Sometimes in well-equipped tertiary urban hospitals and sometimes in rural clinics stocked with little more than Paracetamol. The broken bodies of our people will be presented to you for healing. Bodies broken by poverty, violence, despair and neglect.  By lack of education, transport, food and sometimes hope. You will be stretched to your limit with long hours, sleep deprivation and fatigue, all the while wondering if you are making any difference at all. Seniors may instruct you to put away that pain, build walls around your heart, to keep separate your human self. But I hope you will ignore them.

For with an open heart, the practice of medicine will also bring you great joy. The sunrise smile of a child recovering from gastroenteritis; the special elation of delivering a baby with your first C section; the sheer rush of power when you successfully resuscitate a patient dying of cardiac failure; the beauty of a perfectly sutured wound and the simple thank you gift from a wise gogo in a far flung village you may never have otherwise met. You will have the privilege of being taken into the inner sanctum of people's lives, to the very core of humanness where sickness and suffering reside. And there you will be granted opportunity to perform the miracles that modern medicine has gifted you. The blood to a bleeding accident victim; the chest drain to a man with a pneumothorax; the antibiotic reversing septic shock; the drug that halts the MI. And so, on those rare but wonderful days, you will become a hero.

After your formative clinical years, many paths will open for you: from surgery to paediatrics, public health to pharmacology, with each granting you the possibility of adding to the upliftment of all people, often in immeasurable ways. Whatever your path, I hope that as a doctor you will always make the connections between the symptom, here in this person in this now, with the societal story that has lead to that moment. I hope your open heart, exposed to the injustices of the world through the acute prism of illness, will make a warrior of you. A warrior not just for the health of every patient who comes before you, but also for the health of our country and our world.

I wish you well MBChB class of 2016!

Lydia Cairncross