What do all medical students have in common?

Neither the very good Abitur certificate - after all, other achievements have long been taken into account in the application process in addition to academic achievements - nor the passionate desire to serve people in research or practice, because there are exceptions here too.

But we are all united by our view of the others, the students of other subjects, the members of other professions than that of the doctor;

our conviction that our activity is more honorable, more strenuous and more important than theirs.

If we regard many courses as useless pastimes, and their students as lazy or stupid, we cannot help but concede that the natural sciences are of some use and at times difficult to understand.

The elitist wind of the lawyers

After all, in the introductory courses "Chemistry for Physicians" and "Physics for Physicians" in the first semester, we reliably and violently reach our limits.

We hasten all the more to emphasize that these are auxiliary sciences of medicine, the boring details of which are occupied by those poor souls who are not destined for the highest, i.e. medicine.

We kind of sympathize with lawyers for the elitist wind that blows through law and medical schools alike, but since there is no doubt which discipline is more important than the other, we scoff at their unwarranted arrogance.

But we punish most subjects by simply not knowing about their existence.

"The highest good that society gives"

It is an almost limitless disinterest that leads to this ignorance or contempt for other subjects.

Although we medical students seem to have succumbed to this indifference with all its facets in a particularly reliable manner, I have the suspicion that it has long since found its way into the minds and hearts of others.

In the eyes of others, aren't we a bunch of aloof busybodies who value their reputation and the prestige of the medical profession, the transfiguration of the patients' helpless trust, more than anything else?

And which conversation with us about medicine and its studies would go beyond a meaningless and unquestioning "I couldn't do that"?

Wilhelm von Humboldt, the spiritual father of the universities where we still study alongside the others today, wrote in 1792: “The true purpose of man – not that which changing inclinations dictate to him, but that which eternally unchanging reason dictates – is this highest and most proportionate development of his strengths to form a whole." And so the university in Humboldt's sense was not just the unity of research and teaching, it was also the coexistence of the disciplines, the "diversity resulting from the union of several", of which he his quoted here

"Ideas in an Attempt to Determining the Limits of the Effectiveness of the State"

wrote that it was "the highest good that society gives".

She isn't anymore.

Because may Humboldt be right, may reason be immutable and the purpose of man still be the same, may there be as many forces in us waiting to be formed into a whole - we don't care.

We are resolutely involved in the general self-centeredness, the enigmatic limitation of people to themselves, because in the end we don't care what we did as a field of study, we don't care about human physiology and pathology.

We don't care about anything - except ourselves, of course.

Oskar Mahler

(19 years old) studies medicine at the University of Münster.

When he's not getting lost in the details, he's searching between questions and answers - well, what actually?