Are all surgeons part psychopath?
Don't laugh. A new book suggests plausibly that there may be some truth to the question
There are many reasons to love Rachel Clarke’s new The Story of a Heart, the beautifully written true story of a 9-year-old boy who had a young girl’s heart sewn into his chest.
One is this: Clarke, a palliative care physician, gives a rich context to her account of the organ transplant that saved Max Johnson’s life.
She tells the stories not just of the heart donor and recipient but of the doctors, nurses, and families involved in a medical drama that made headlines in Britain, often digressing artfully into questions like: What kind of surgeon is drawn to such heartrending work?
One section revisits a 2015 article in the Bulletin of the Royal College of Surgeons of England cannily titled, “A Stressful Job: Are Surgeons Psychopaths? And If So, Is That Such A Bad Thing?”
The two authors, both trauma and orthopedic surgeons, speculated that the strains of medicine might cause top doctors to show some of the characteristics of a psychopathic personality. These traits include “a preternatural calmness under pressure, or an apparent indifference to human suffering when making life-or-death decisions.”
To test their hypothesis, the authors looked at the personality traits of 172 doctors using the official Psychopathic Personality Inventory. Clarke writes:
“Controversially, they found that doctors did indeed appear to have higher-than-average psychopathy scores, with one of the criteria—‘stress immunity’—being particularly prevalent among surgeons. The authors concluded that psychopathic personality traits might, perversely, lead to better patient care since too much empathy could cause doctors to turn away from their patients, finding it too painful emotionally to engage with them.”
Clarke adds that some renowned surgeons appear to have the additional trait of “coldheartedness,” defined in the Psychopathic Personality Inventory as being “guiltless, callous, unreactive to others’ distress.”
Those doctors might include the late Christiaan Barnard, who did the first human heart transplant. Barnard once told a fellow surgeon that when some patients died, he was upset less about the death than the blow to his ego.
Or, as Clarke quotes him in The Story of a Heart, “I should not have had a death with this type of operation; I’m too good for that.”
She adds that perhaps the only firm conclusion you can draw from all of it is that “psychopathy, like humanity, is complicated, and glib assertions are best avoided.’
Clarke doesn’t go so far as to say so, but—apparently—if your doctor appears to be a real-life Hannibal Lecter, you might benefit from it.