You can’t teach morality. At least, so I’ve heard. It’s definitely hard to legislate.

What about empathy? Is this ability to understand the predicament and station in life of others without needing to experience it yourself a God-given talent, or can you learn it? If you can learn it, do you have to grow up learning it, or can you take a course like you can for speed reading?

To be empathetic, must you be like Bill Clinton, who is a master at feeling people’s pain? Or can it be more of an “I hear ya, brother” or a “That’s what I’m talkin’ about” kind of a thing?

I’ve been pondering this because we have an orientation month in our residency. One of the scheduled activities in this jam-packed month is a patient encounter. The twist is that the resident meets the patient in triage and then accompanies him or her through the entire ED visit. I had the idea of giving the residents ipecac and ex-lax in their sandwiches at lunch and then waiting to see who shows up first for treatment. We thought better of it.

We don’t make them stay the night if we happen to be boarding patients, but they are expected to stay with the patient until a disposition is made. They may not participate in the care, and they may not come out and socialize. They are stuck in the room with the patient and family. They get to experience the waiting, the poor communication, the uncertainty, and the frustration of being a patient.

After the experience, they write a 500-word essay about the experience. Can you guess who came up with that great idea? So far, the residents think that the experience is worthwhile.

Now, nobody at our place is thinking that a few hours stuck in a room with Toledo’s version of the Osbournes is going to flip the switch for an unsympathetic soul. We do feel that this time with the patient and her family will prepare the soil for seeds of empathic behavior to be planted.

If you want to find empathy deep enough to swim in, spend some time with first- and second-year medical students. They would give a stinky homeless guy a ride to the shelter in their brand new Chevy. It’s refreshing but at the same time sad, because I know that for many of them this will be lost by the end of the first clinical year.