From time to time, I attend the meeting of a group of doctors
who are interested in the philosophical foundations and
implications of their work. The most recent such meeting was
addressed by an academic philosopher on the subject of the
Aristotelian conception of virtue. For some reason that I
cannot now recall, the question came up in the discussion
afterwards of whether there were human experiences so
terrible that they were beyond the powers of medicine to
assuage, or of doctors, at least qua doctors, to alleviate.

A former colleague of mine, a man of wide and cosmopolitan
culture, held that there were not; in essence, that there
was no human response that, at least potentially or in
theory, fell outside the schema of pathogenesis, diagnosis,
prognosis, and treatment. I held the opposite. I maintained
that even the concept of diagnosis was, in certain
circumstances, unseemly, diminishing, and demeaning. Life has
depths that cannot be plumbed by technical means.

In asserting this, I was thinking of a passage in a recent
book about the Rwandan genocide by Jean Hatzfeld, The
Strategy of Antelopes.[1]
It is the third in a trilogy of books
on the subject by the author, a former correspondent of the
left-wing French daily Libération. In the first, called
Life Laid Bare, he interviewed survivors of the genocide, a
few of the 9,000 Tutsis who, out of 59,000, survived the
massacres in a region of Rwanda called the Bugesera.