As a pre-med student, I’ve taken Biology and am in the middle now of MicroBiology. In that class, we actually touched upon Snow’s remarkable accomplishment of figuring out cholera’s dastardly ways. We also talked about the symptoms and just how deadly it was. But none of the classes that I’ve taken so far come close to demonstrating just how gruesome and terrible it actually was. It is, and will always be, something imaginary, something that unless we actually contract, we can only sympathize, not empathize. But trying to put yourself in their collective perspective is, in my opinion, probably one of the few skills needed to effectively run public health initiatives. Understanding the disease is only one of the skills. Understanding the effect it has on the public is an entirely different and more powerful one, one that is absolutely necessary in order to effectively combat the panics of the public. As we see with Thomas Latta and his cure, which actually worked, his insights were buried under the public’s clamor for a cure, any cure at all, even ones that were most probably hoaxes.

My question then is: How do public health officials get this skill? Reading books is definitely not enough. How is it possible to obtain this very powerful skill of not just sympathizing, but empathizing?

– Joseph Kabariti