(If the forecasts are true, doctors are going to be coming under incredible pressure. And so will the rest of us, healthy or sick. Although Dr. Frank Crane wrote this prayer for doctors, the medical kind, it seems adaptable to a lot of other people these days, with only a few changes.)
THE PRAYER OF THE PHYSICIAN
O God, I pray that I may have absolute intellectual honesty. Let others fumble, shuffle, and evade, but let me, the physician, cleave to the clean truth, assume no knowledge I have not and claim no skill I do not possess.
Cleanse me from all credulities, all fatuous enthusiasms, all stubbornness, vanities, egotism, prejudices, and whatever else may clog the sound process of my mind. These be dirt; make my personality as aseptic as my instruments.
Give me heart, but let my feelings be such as shall come over me as an investment of power, to make my thoughts clear and cold as stars, and my hand skillful—strong as steel.
Deliver me from professionalism, so that I may be always human, and thus minister to sickly minds as well as to ailing bodies.
Give me a constant realization of my responsibility. People believe in me. Into my hands they lay their lives. Let me, of all men, be sober and walk in the far of eternal justice. Let no culpable ignorance of mine, no neglect nor love of ease, spoil the worth of my high calling.
Make my discretion strong as religion, that the necessary secrets of souls confided in me may be as it told to the priests.
Give me the joy of healing. I know how far short I am of being a good man; but make me a good doctor.
Give me that love and eagerness and pride in my work without which the practice of my profession will be fatal to me and to them under my care.
Give me a due and decent self-esteem, that I may regard no man’s occupation higher than mine, envying not the king upon his throne so long as I am prime minister to the suffering.
Deliver me from playing at precedence, from the hankering for praise and prominence, from sensitiveness, and all like forms of toxic selfishness.
Give me money; not so little that I cannot have the leisure I need to put quality into my service; not so much that I shall grow fat in head and leaden in heart, and sell my sense of ministry for the flesh-pots of indulgence.
Give me courage, but hold me back from over-confidence.
Let me so discharge the duties of my office that I shall not be ashamed to look any man or woman in the face, and that when at death I lay down my task I shall go to what judgment awaits me strong in the consciousness that I have done something toward alleviating the incurable tragedy of life.
Amen.