The Greek word for “return” is nostos.
Algos means “suffering”.
So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance
This quote was mentioned by Milan Kundera in his inimitable novel “Ignorance”. Actually, no one, not even content, in a Kundera novel is happy since he takes such dizzying concepts as absence, forgetting and illusion. Last night, I was revisiting his book after decades, to face his petty and cruel characters again. All of a sudden, his quote on “nostalgia” seemed to strike the right note with me. That was a night for me to chill after a busy faculty schedule, in which I held a mid-term “reflection” session with medical students. I was trying to get over the disappointment I’d felt after the lecture, since the majority of the class declared their disinterest in surgical training. I’ve never been dismissive towards the generations that follow us. However, as a surgeon, I suddenly felt poetic and nostalgic about the good old days when surgical training and pursuing a career in surgery were extremely popular among doctors. I thought that the reason for declining interest in surgical training may be due to surgical residents’ inevitable exhaustion, a reality which medical students can't help but notice. Unfortunately, from the outside, what they observe rings true.
It’s not a coincidence that our new issue starts with the editorial by Prof. G. Karadeniz Cakmak with her stunning title “Winter is coming: Is the shine of surgery fading?” as she emphasized that the decreasing interest in surgery residency is a dynamic and multifaceted issue, stemming from work-life balance concerns, the emotional and physical burden of surgery, and shifting societal values around career goals and personal well-being. Kivratma et al. shared their results of an important survey on surgical training, where they found that the residents expressed low levels of satisfaction with the training and that improvements are vital in several areas concerning the training and working conditions of resident physicians. After scrutinizing the survey, I acknowledge that we should have stronger arguments than telling the trainees that everything gets better the senior they get, which is far from convincing.
As Ambroise Paré once said, “There are five duties of surgery: to remove what is superfluous, to restore what has been dislocated, to separate what has grown together, to reunite what has been divided, and to redress the defects of nature.”. These tasks still remain divine for me and, despite all the challenges, I believe that to be a surgeon, we have to live and breathe it.
I’d like to thank all my colleagues in surgery for their devotion against all odds. And as always, thanks to our readers for their support.
Prof. M. Umit Ugurlu
TurkJSurg Editor-in-Chief
