Doctor

A doctor's work is helping your body when it cannot put its own hurts right. Most hurts do not need one: your body knows what to do with a small cut, and after some days the cut is gone. But some hurts are very big, and some diseases are very strong. A doctor is a person who has learned, for many years, what to do then.

How a doctor finds the bad thing

Your body cannot say words, but it can show things. A doctor looks at it, touches it, and asks you questions: Where does it hurt? When did it start? Does it hurt more if I press here? The doctor puts an ear, or a small tool, on you, and hears the part inside you that pushes your blood, and hears the air going in and out of you. If the doctor needs to see your bones, there are machines that make a kind of light that can go through your body and take a picture of what is inside — no cutting at all.

The very small living things

Many diseases are made by very small living things — many times smaller than the smallest animal your eyes have seen. They go into your body through your mouth, your nose, or a cut, and inside you they grow in number, and your body has to make them die before there are very many of them. When they win for a time, you feel it: you are hot, then cold, and you do not want food.

A long time before now, doctors did not know about these very small living things. A doctor could touch a dead body, and then touch a woman who was having a child, and carry the very small living things from one to the other — and very many women died because of this. One doctor saw that when doctors cleaned their hands between one person and another, not as many people died. He told the other doctors. They laughed at him, and he died sad. He was right. Now cleaning the hands is one of the first things a doctor learns.

The helping things

Some of a doctor's helping things are chemicals: small things you eat or drink. Some of them make the very small living things die. Some make a big hurt feel like a small one. Long before now, people used parts of plants for this, and some of them did work — some helping things we have now were first found in plants.

There are times when the bad thing is a piece that has to be taken out of the body. The doctor gives you something that makes you sleep, and you feel no thing at all. Then she cuts, very carefully; takes the bad piece out; and puts the two sides of the cut near each other. Your body does what no doctor can do: it puts the cut right, as it puts all small hurts right. When the sleep ends, the bad piece is gone.

Where doctors go

Doctors work in big houses made for this work, where there are many rooms, many machines, and people who help day and through the black hours. But doctors go to other places when they are needed. When countries hurt each other, doctors go with the soldiers — not to hurt, but to help. The woman who found the dying atoms put light machines into vehicles and took them to the hurt men, and with these machines the doctors found the metal inside the men and took it out.

Why they do it

A person learns for many years at a school for adults to become a doctor, and the learning does not end there: doctors learn all their days, because what people know about the body grows year after year. And the work is hard: a doctor sees people on their hardest days. But if you ask doctors why they do it, many will say the same thing: one time, they helped a person who was dying, and the person did not die.

If you are well now, thank your body: it is doing most of the work on its own. If one day it cannot — go to a doctor, and tell them where it hurts. That is how all the helping starts.