Bologna

Passion Communicated on the Wards
With the Patients, Embracing the Man

Four years ago, they were his co-workers, young doctors who found in him a teacher from whom to learn the medical profession and love for the concrete person. Then Enzo Piccinini died, but that passion for work has not been lost. Not at all

By Giampaolo Cerri

They remember that May morning as though it were yesterday, even though almost four years have passed. Their teacher, their friend, their brother Enzo Piccinini had died tragically the evening before, in an automobile accident, and they, his young co-workers, feeling destroyed, annihilated, desperate, had to go to his patients and tell them. They had to say to someone waiting to be operated on, and maybe attaching so many hopes to that operation, that this bold surgeon, this doctor who never backed down, was no longer there. They are a group of very young doctors, doing their specializations or just finished, who had taken their first steps in the profession with Piccinini in the Clinica Chirurgica III of Sant'Orsola Hospital in Bologna. All of them were far from being established in the profession and thus felt lost when he died. "Someone suggested that we look around and that each of us should follow his own path," Giampaolo recalls today.
Like in a bad script, after discovering the exciting adventure of work, after tasting the medical profession as a way of embracing what is human as well as taking care of human beings, after living unforgettable days of toil, joy, success, and strong emotion, after experiencing an all-embracing friendship, here was a ferociously tragic finale.
" Yes, we did feel like giving everything up," Marco confirms. And yet, already in one patient's farewell, a woman who had seen them working all together with Enzo leading the team, there was the augury of a future in common. Marco remembers, "A woman who had been operated on for a tumor said to us, 'I have been in lots of hospitals, but I have never seen a group like yours.'"

A real heritage
After they got over the wrench of Enzo's sudden death, the idea of staying together began to take root, and those who had already begun to accept the first opportunities to work elsewhere changed their minds. Giancarlo and Giampaolo gave up posts on the staffs of other hospitals far away from Bologna. Younger colleagues, like Antonello, Marco, and Simone did the same. “The idea began to take hold of us that the heritage of passion for work built up by Enzo should not be wasted,” Giampaolo says. Then the imponderable happened: a hospital chief of staff, “who in the past had even been against Enzo,” offered them the chance to work together.
And so, slowly, “Piccinini’s guys,” as everyone called them on the ward, became established, in a strange mixture of intolerance and admiration. With this desire to work together, Giancarlo, Giampaolo, Antonello, and more recently Marco, one after the other, obtained permanent positions, while Simone, who has just finished his specialization, is awaiting his turn. Uniting them is the awareness that they have lived a unique professional and human experience. Working with Piccinini was extraordinarily exciting. Not that it was easy: “When he was away from the hospital, he might phone us every half hour,” Simone recalls. “He wanted to be kept informed about patients’ conditions, and he would give us precise instructions, then in the next phone call would ask about their results.”
This is a way of being a physician that is outside the traditional canons. “He had an enormous capacity for work,” Giampaolo observes. “At the moment of his death, he was following the cases of fourteen patients out of twenty in the ward.” Patients would come from all over Italy, mobilized by an inexorable, discreet grapevine, which told of an impassioned surgeon who never hesitated and was not afraid of taking on apparently desperate cases. “The idea was to try everything possible in order to give an improved life expectancy or at any rate an improved quality of life to everyone,” Marco observes.
He was someone who divided the healing art into those who worked with passion and those who worked merely out of duty. “A merely dutiful doctor was one who responded only technically to the person’s need for someone to share his pain,” Giampaolo explains. This is why Piccinini would often repeat to his co-workers an old university election slogan: “A passion, not a trade.”

Not a trade
Passion could make one share with a patient and his family members the drama of an operation; passion could make one speak tenderly and frankly with a patient whose life was at risk without leaving him in desperation; passion could lead one to go visit him in his home once he was discharged from the hospital.
“ He taught us that the first professional duty is to respond seriously to the need for treatment; however, this does not imply a distance from the person but rather demands a sharing,” Giampaolo points out. “We are not able to operate on a person and then tell him goodbye,” Antonello confirms.
Because of passion, today this group of hospital physicians has set up, without any professional obligation to do so, a well-equipped classroom with mannequins to enable university students to practice. Because of passion, they bring students working on their specializations into operating rooms so they can get some practice outside their classroom hours. Because of passion, they set up exchanges with consultants from Madrid and Boston, met by Piccinini during his frequent trips abroad for work.

The greatest lesson
“ We are not anything special,” Giampaolo admits, “We have simply learned from him how to approach reality.”
“ They are a presence that, seen from the outside, is impressive,” says Andrea, a doctor friend who works in the hospital administration. “It is unheard of for a surgeon to keep going into the other wards to see a patient he has already operated on, without being called.”
This is a way of approaching work that does not just fall out of the sky. “Enzo taught us by entrusting enormous responsibilities to us, but always being ready to correct us,” Simone recalls. “He was capable of furiously tearing you apart in the waiting room, in front of several hundred people.”
What was the greatest lesson? “That of not being afraid of one’s limit, of being defeated,” Giampaolo answers, “which is something the merely dutiful practitioner finds intolerable. A patient who presents complications, an unsuccessful operation, a failure, are damnation to him. The ‘merely dutiful’ will do everything possible to have a patient like this transferred quickly, gotten out of sight. This is why the ‘merely dutiful,’ here as in America, hardly ever accept operations on desperate cases–they ruin the statistics.”
His is a difficult human and professional legacy. “Yes, and we feel every day the disproportion,” Giampaolo continues, “but we are also aware of the task of not losing what we have learned, with which we can try to build something fine, whose outline is not even in our hands. And too, we have the desire to try to make it flourish.”