An Example of a Modern Secular Spiritual and Moral Guideline for the Physician: Shaping the Biography of a New Type of "Saint"

Abstract

In the modern educational process, additional lectures are increasingly being introduced into the mandatory postgraduate education programme, aimed at developing the personal qualities of a physician, increasing the motivation of students towards the profession, and increasing the attractiveness of the image of a medical professional and a scientist. To that end, certain moral and ethical reference points are selected from the biographies of physicians of the "past", which are elevated to an ideal and repeated in every biographical article without proper professional evaluation. The mythologisation of the image of the physician in the professional community and in the mass consciousness is thus the subject of a separate study. In this article, the author examines the biography of Friedrich Joseph Haass, a nineteenth-century Moscow physician beatified by the Roman Catholic Church, in the context of the emergence of the biography of a new type of "saint" and examples of new secular spiritual and moral reference points, different from the traditionally established Church attributes of holiness, and in the absence of a close connection to the religious institution of the Church.