I’ve been thinking about the usage of “at the front lines” to describe nurses, doctors, and therapists providing direct clinical care.

More battle imagery.
#COVID19 https://twitter.com/hastie_md/status/1244329903924883462

Once again, it’s understandable to compare clinicians to soldiers. Clinicians are putting themselves in harm’s way. They are expending effort at great personal and physical cost.

They are removed from their families and are brave.

There is a mission: to save lives.

But here is where the similarity ends. Clinicians are not playing defense. They are not armed with weapons for a fight.

For their tools are medicines and therapies. Their “armamentarium” involves bathing a patient, calling family members desperate for an update, and giving restoring balm.

They are not so much fighting the virus as nurturing and healing humans.

The sheer magnitude of the effort and the number of people involved in health-CARE deserve their own language and metaphors that do justice to the spirit.

We should have not reach for linguistics of violence to describe and understand what we are doing.

Let’s not limit ourselves to seeing clinicians fighting at the front lines.

Let us rather admire the doctors and nurses giving magnanimous aid.