The Helper, Some Thoughts And Considerations

 

Helping the helpless patient to have something he craves, like in this photo, is help although smoking as a rule isn't healthy. Maybe especially not for an injured man like this one with injured arms. However, I'll deem it to be a genuine act of helpfulness and as such an instance of kindness. I take it that maybe these two guys became friends after being committed to the same hospital when they were injured. That means that they in some respects were equals, and that the man with the severely injured arms may have been of help to his helper, e.g. by being able to walk ....

Being Red Cross nurses these ladies were professional helpers, just as the presumed doctor tending to the patient. All of them must have been paid for their services although they may have volunteered to join Red Cross. That means that receiving wages their help may have been a genuine act of kindness turned into a way of earning money. Did they sacrifice anything in their private lives to become nurses or did they first and foremost go for a job that gave them the wages they needed? Who knows? Nobody but themselves, but for at long time the job as nurse was one of the few acceptable opportunities for women of a certain social standing who wanted some kind of career.

 

Something like that will not have been part of the job description, but it is in accordance with the romanticizing of the job: "Nurses are angels and will do anything to save people." 

This guy, Christopher Duntsch, wasn't a nurse, but a neuro surgeon who ruined the life of several patients by being an incompetent and also arrogant doctor. Actually, it seems that not only did he blunder when operating, but he set out to harm his patients. These saw him as a "helper" in the old sense of the word, but he was anything but. The only thing he wanted to "help" was his wallet and his own over-blown ego.

Oh yes, but how does one spot that trait in someone who likes the role of an expert? I wish I knew because just like the injured patients of Duntsch I am not sure I would notice it in people of another kind of jobs. For instance, how would one know that what a plumber said wasn't true? And what about professional politicians? Nor easy, right?

 

 

Unfortunately, Competence may in reality be INCOMPETENCE, and we don't know ....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_of_mercy_(criminology)

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Duntsch