The courage to see
When asked whether he missed practicing medicine, Rufin paused, then smiled: ‘I never left it. I just changed instruments. A pen can reveal as much as a scalpel.’ The audience laughed softly, but the truth of his words lingered. For Rufin, writing remains a form of care – one that dissects human experience with tenderness instead of steel.
He spoke of his younger self, the doctor walking through refugee camps with nothing but gauze, hope, and exhaustion; and of his older self, the writer who still searches for the same thing – a way to understand suffering and give it shape. ‘When you write,’ he said, ‘you heal a little – not only others, but yourself.’
As the session closed, the applause carried both admiration and gratitude. Rufin had not spoken of imaging protocols or artificial intelligence, but of something rarer: the ethics of attention – the act of truly seeing another human being.
In a congress filled with technology, his words offered a kind of radiography of the soul – reminding everyone in the room that beyond the noise of machines, the essence of medicine is still, and always will be, a story.
Profile:
Jean-Christophe Rufin is a French doctor, diplomat, historian and novelist. He is a former president of Action Against Hunger, one of the earliest members of Doctors Without Borders, and a member of the Academy française. After completing his residency in neurology in 1981, mainly at La Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, Rufin became a senior registrar and assistant at Paris hospitals, then an attaché at Paris hospitals. Rufin is one of the pioneers of the humanitarian movement Doctors Without Borders (MSF), where he was drawn to Bernard Kouchner’s personality and where he met Claude Malhuret. For MSF, he has led numerous missions in East Africa and Latin America. He has received countless awards for his literary work, notably the Prix Goncourt for first novel for “The Abyssinian” in 1997 and the Prix Goncourt for his historical novel “Brazil Red” in 2001.