For Medicine Week of the Philippine Medical Association — Metropolitan Davao Medical Society
DAVAO CITY, Philippines—Today, Sept. 20, the medical doctors will have the wreath-laying before the monument of Dr. Jose Rizal. We will once again honor a man who studied medicine not merely to heal eyes, but to examine the sickness of an entire nation.
Let us admit it: Rizal has been written about endlessly as “national hero.” But within our own profession there is a more precise description of him—he was the first diagnostician of colonial Philippines.
In the Noli and the Fili, he did not merely caricature the friars; he catalogued the symptoms: corruption, slavery in the name of religion, the prostitution of the intellect. He even supplied the terminology himself—“social cancer.” In clinical language, Rizal took a history, reviewed the outward systems, and proposed a treatment: reform, education, the correction of institutions. The present day physicians also advocate these in the spirit of accountability and justice.
But every physician knows the limitation of a diagnosis: it may be correct, and the patient may still refuse to believe it.
This is where Andres Bonifacio enters.
What our ceremonies often miss is this: before Rizal was ever shot at Bagumbayan, the pathology report had already been written—in the patient’s own language.
In 1896, in the single issue of the newspaper Kalayaan, Bonifacio—writing under the pen name Agapito Bagumbayan—published the essay “Ang Dapat Mabatid ng mga Tagalog” (What the Tagalogs Should Know). Here the difference between the two healers of the nation becomes clear. If Rizal revealed the disease through characters like Padre Damaso, Bonifacio itemized it, one entry at a time. Three hundred years, he wrote, the Tagalogs had “supported and sustained the race of Legazpi,” and the repayment was treachery, false belief, and dishonor. Reason, he argued, would now show the Tagalogs the “separate, self-reliant road” they must take.
Read it carefully: he named the disease, enumerated the symptoms, and identified the source. The God of the friars, he said, was not the true God who accepts no offering of human sweat and tears. In plain terms, Bonifacio concluded that the “social cancer” Rizal had described was not a fever brought by the times, but an infection deliberately spread by a system that profited from it.
And here Bagumbayan enters the story.
It would be inaccurate to say that Rizal’s execution “awakened” the nation in a simple sense. The Revolution had already broken out in August 1896, four months before the execution. The treatment had begun before the autopsy. But the shooting of Rizal on December 30, 1896 supplied the final piece of evidence.
As Britannica puts it, Rizal’s public execution “so enraged and united Filipinos as to make permanent retention of power by Spain clearly impossible.” In our own idiom: many Filipinos then, like many patients today, hesitate until the biopsy result is in. The firing squad at Bagumbayan was the biopsy. It revealed the tumor as malignant and unresponsive to palliative reform.
There is one more detail almost never mentioned on occasions like this, and for us physicians it is the most moving of all. After the execution, Bonifacio translated Rizal’s final poem—Mi último adiós—into Tagalog, giving it the title Pahimakas. Consider what this means. On one side, a physician trained in Europe, a graduate of Madrid and Heidelberg, with degrees and medals. On the other, a clerk from Tondo with no formal medical education. Yet in that moment the two charts merged: the clerk read the physician’s final orders and transcribed them into the patient’s own tongue. There is no clearer image of professional solidarity in our nation’s histor—and it is precisely the spirit of Medicine Week.
One caveat belongs in an honest account, as it would in an honest chart: some scholars, notably Glenn May, have questioned the provenance of both “Ang Dapat Mabatid” and “Pag-ibig sa Tinubuang Lupa,” arguing the texts “do not deserve the respect that historians have given them” over the years. But Dr. Pio Valenzuela—a man inside the Movement, the very man who proposed the name Kalayaan—attributed both works to Bonifacio, and as one scholar notes, “there is no obvious reason why he should pretend it was Bonifacio if it was not.” The lesson for us is this: even Bonifacio’s texts, like Rizal’s retraction, are contested ground. But as in medicine, what is asked of us is to weigh the evidence before us—not to assume the outcome we wish to be true.
And so, as we lay our flowers at the foot of the monument, let us put to ourselves the question that Rizal and Bonifacio together bequeath to every generation of physicians:
If colonial Philippines was the patient then—who is the patient before us now?
Perhaps it is time someone wrote our own generation’s “What Filipinos Should Know” about health. Let us name the symptoms plainly: the maldistribution of physicians and nurses toward the cities, the contractualization of our health workers, the crushing out-of-pocket costs borne by the Filipino patient, the barangay health stations without medicines. We can no longer behave like the friars who pretended there was no sickness while profiting from the sick.
Rizal made the diagnosis. Bonifacio itemized the chart and wrote it in the patient’s language. The question before all of us now, my colleagues in the Metropolitan Davao Medical Society, is this:
What will you sign on this generation’s chart? (davaotoday.com)
