if you say that seven hours is too long to walk for two families of patients, you’re saying that their lives matter less than some others’, and the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that’s wrong with the world. I think he undertakes what, earlier today, he called “journeys to the sick” in part because he has to, in order to keep going. “That’s when I feel most alive,” he told me once on an airplane, “when I’m helping people.” He makes these house calls regularly and usually without blan witnesses, at times when no one from Harvard or WHO can see him kneeling on mud floors
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