The Most Noble Profession

Yesterday while chatting with my mother, something came up. She mentioned that being a doctor is the most noble profession on Earth as they help so many people in need. This stuck in my mind for sometime. The consensus, especially in the time of pandemic, has been the same I guess.
But is it necessarily true?

Ofcourse saving people’s lives is a very noble thing and it is priceless. But are all doctors noble? There have been numerous cases of doctors being selfish and downright cruel including, cases of animal cruelty, overloading surgeries to save time and earn more money, and deaths due to medical negligence are increasingly becoming common. I am not denying the benefit that doctors provide to the society at large, all I’m saying is, not all doctors are in it for the social service.

Other professions including police, engineering, teaching (or professorship), research, army, plumbing, electricians, sanitation workers, etc, all play their irreplaceable parts in the society. We can’t replace any of the above said people with a doctor as and when we wish. The whole society is composed of people taking up professions to pay for their daily needs and in the process offering their services that benefit the society.
We should not forget that the primary goal of a profession is to provide for self. This is pretty evident from the current mentality of our parental generation (in India especially). People want their children to be either engineers or doctors because it pays well, not because it will benefit strangers that they come across. Honestly, I have seen countless students drop year after year to achieve their parent’s “dream” of being a doctor.

The nobility of the profession is discussed to a very large extent in our society and most people are categorized or stereotyped according to their profession. But, profession is just one aspect of someone’s life. What I feel should be used to categorize people, if at all it is necessary, is their passion (I digress). Things that they enjoy doing.

(Back on track) Putting people into blocks of profession and giving them a general notion of nobility according to their job is something weird for me. Instead I think we should all try to ascertain the nobility of a given individual. Hopefully people will understand this someday.