It is an honor beyond comment to have The Roanoke Academy of Medicine determine I should receive the Lifetime Achievement Award.
Looking back, there is but one other honor which compares: to be admitted to the brotherhood of the practice of medicine in the first place. Even in my beginning days as a physician, I never strove to be the best doctor there has ever been; merely to be my best; and given the competition out there, that was a far more attainable goal.
Most days, I was but an average practitioner, at least in my own reckoning; and yes, sometimes, I fell below my best clinical abilities. But I have also experienced – in moments of rare grace – exceeding myself; and briefly known the passing exultation of success.
In the years I practiced, it seems that I sensed about me the presence of benevolent apparitions; the fraternity of healers from the past, high priests and primitives; some dressed in the skins of animals, others in high starched collars, watching me to ensure that the traditions and intentions of healing were not here violated.
I fancy that into my hands, and the hands of all present-day physicians, has been passed the unfinished end of a chain which reaches back across the dusty expanses of collective memory to the beginning times of man; to the shamen and mystics – the first healers; and that chain, when finished, will stretch impossibly beyond my sight into the times to come.
It was never part of my delusions that I would make any lasting contributions to medicine. I was content to work upon the task assigned me; that it was my directed responsibility to fashion and smooth the link before me. So, it was upon it and no other that I lavished my attention.
But it is now official: Ol’ Garvin is a relic, an antique who sits on history’s dusty shelf next to beads, and rattles and chants – they once the high-point of human therapeutic exertions.
That I now sit here is no cause for regret, for that is the natural order of things; the healers of the present day take up the torch which I and my predecessors passed to them. I rather expect in times to come, I will be joined by MRI’s and CAT scans as they are, in their time, deposed, and newer technologies take their place.
But, two things I shall never see on this shelf: Compassion and Caring; for they are integral, timeless, and, finally, indispensable to the healing arts.
– Lucky Garvin
