When it comes to continuing a legacy and thriving in personal purpose, Alex Kor, DPM ’89, has spent a lifetime doing so. As a podiatric physician, he has championed honest, personable patient care. As the son of two Holocaust survivors, he knows the dire importance of seeing the humanity in the person across the office from him.

Most recently, Dr. Kor has been circuiting his lecture series — The Lessons of the Holocaust for Healthcare: Personal, Professional and Historical Reflections — which examines the role of informed consent and individual responsibility, in addition to detailing some of the nuances of his mother’s own career as a medical-ethics lecturer.

“The lecture has kind of developed over the last several years,” he said, “and now, for me, since both my parents are no longer with us, it gives me an opportunity to at least tell my parents’ story — hopefully, in the setting of teaching young doctors and residents about the positive and negative impact that they can have on their patients.”

“... I remember my mom saying, ‘Look, your dad’s a survivor, I’m a survivor and you’ll be a survivor.’ ”

Outside of his own family history, another personal connection that has kept Dr. Kor aligned with pursuing ethical patient care was a personal battle with his own health. In 1987, while still at Dr. William M. Scholl College of Podiatric Medicine, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer, and subsequently successfully treated.

“To me, that’s always been a source of strength. The old adage, ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ for me has always been kind of a recurring source of perseverance. And if any time I need a little boost in my morale, I always think: ‘I can overcome that, I can overcome this,’” Dr. Kor said. “And I remember my mom saying, ‘Look, your dad’s a survivor, I’m a survivor and you’ll be a survivor.’”

Part of Dr. Kor’s work attempts to reinvigorate the empathy that can be lost on individuals after the lengthy medical school process or years on the job. Having spoken with medical personnel that attend his lectures, Dr. Kor found a portion of that population hit a wall at some point in their career, making it difficult for them to muster the sensitivity their role requires.

“One of the students at the end of (my) lecture said, ‘When I got into medicine, I was very excited and very interested — which I still am — but unfortunately now, four years later, I’ve lost the empathy for patients. Do you think learning about the Holocaust will help some of my fellow colleagues become more empathetic like we were when we started out?’

Dr. Kor and his mother at Auschwitz.

“I said, ‘Yes,’ and I never thought of it (before), but then I did a little research, and it’s a huge problem for people in medical school … they’ve lost that empathy, which is the reason they went into medicine in the beginning.”

In response to this mounting dilemma, he adamantly suggests that to fend off these limitations, doctors should search for the humanity in each patient, and look to history to better understand why.

“When they do have a lot of empathy for people, I think they need to reconnect (to that) over the next couple years as they become more busy. They may make a conscious effort to visit a nursing home or visit people who are not so well-off. One could visit a museum or a monument to some terrible tragedy to learn about how people have overcome, how they persevered against incredible odds. I think they need to … see when society went mad, and what they can possibly do in the future to avoid such terrible situations.” 

Margaret Smith is a Chicago-based freelance editor and writer whose work largely focuses on current sociopolitical happenings.