A visit to the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm, Sweden

What happens when one comes across a bevy of super-brainy persons who ended up contributing something significant to the society at large?

For one, the sheer creativity and perseverance of such persons leaves one shaking one’s head in awe, admiration, and bafflement. One wonders as to from which plane of consciousness these persons were operating while making discoveries which have improved our lives. It also makes one realize how little one has achieved in one’s own life. A deep feeling of humility envelopes one. And yes, it motivates us lesser mortals to do something better in our own lives!

On a recent visit to Stockholm, your truly could visit the Nobel Prize Museum in the city. In the process, all the feelings mentioned above were experienced.

When Negativity Leads to Positivity

Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel (1833-1896) was a chemist, engineer, and inventor. He amassed a fortune during his lifetime, with most of his wealth coming from his 355 inventions, of which dynamite is the most famous.

In 1888, Nobel was astonished to read his own obituary, titled “The merchant of death is dead”, in a French newspaper. In fact, it was Alfred’s brother Ludvig who had died in an uncontrolled experiment relating to explosives. The article disconcerted Nobel and made him apprehensive about how he would be remembered.

Nobel wrote several wills during his lifetime. Inspired by the death of his brother, he composed the last one over a year before he died, signing it at the Swedish–Norwegian Club in Paris on 27 November 1895, bequeathing all his ‘remaining reliable assets’ to create the prestigious prize named after him. In his will, he wrote that he wanted to reward those who had ‘conferred the greatest benefit to humankind’.

On December 10, 1896, Alfred Nobel died in his villa in San Remo, Italy, from a cerebral haemorrhage. He was 63 years old then.

Owing to scepticism surrounding the will, it was not approved by the Norwegian Parliament until 26 April 1897.

Nobel Prizes were first awarded in 1901.

Nobel Prizes were originally awarded in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace. In 1968, Sweden’s central bank funded the establishment of the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, to also be administered by the Nobel Foundation.

In 1905, the union between Sweden and Norway was dissolved. Till this day, except for the Peace Prize, the Nobel Prizes are presented in Stockholm, Sweden, at the annual Prize Award Ceremony on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

The Prize

The prize ceremonies take place annually. Each recipient (known as a “laureate”) receives a gold medal, a diploma, and a monetary award. In 2021, the Nobel Prize monetary award was 10,000,000 SEK.

The recipients’ lectures are normally held in the days prior to the award ceremony. The Peace Prize and its recipients’ lectures are presented at the annual Prize Award Ceremony in Oslo, Norway, usually on December 10.

The award ceremonies and the associated banquets are major international events. One can secure an invitation to these only if one happens to know some of the laureates! I understand that these are now broadcast live.  

The Prizes awarded in Sweden’s ceremonies are held at the Stockholm Concert Hall, with the Nobel banquet following immediately at Stockholm City Hall.

The Nobel Peace Prize ceremony has been held at the Norwegian Nobel Institute (1905–1946), at the auditorium of the University of Oslo (1947–1989), and at Oslo City Hall (1990–present).

The highlight of the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm occurs when each Nobel laureate steps forward to receive the prize from the hands of the King of Sweden. In Oslo, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee presents the Nobel Peace Prize in the presence of the King of Norway and the Norwegian royal family.

After the award ceremony in Sweden, a banquet is held in the Blue Hall at the Stockholm City Hall, which is attended by the Swedish Royal Family and around 1,300 guests. The Nobel Peace Prize banquet is held in Norway at the Oslo Grand Hotel after the award ceremony. Apart from the laureate, guests include the president of the Norwegian Parliament, on occasion the Swedish prime minister, and, since 2006, the King and Queen of Norway. In total, about 250 guests attend.

The Curious Case of India’s Apostle of Non-violence

Although Mahatma Gandhi, an icon of non-violence in the 20th century, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times, in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947, and a few days before he was assassinated on January 30, 1948, he was never awarded the prize, possibly due to the cordial relations between Norway and the United Kingdom.  

In 1948, the year of Gandhi’s death, the Norwegian Nobel Committee decided to make no award that year on the grounds that “there was no suitable living candidate”.

In 1989, this omission was publicly regretted, when the 14th Dalai Lama was awarded the Peace Prize, the chairman of the committee said that it was “in part a tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi”.

Geir Lundestad, 2006 Secretary of Norwegian Nobel Committee, said:

The greatest omission in our 106-year history is undoubtedly that Mahatma Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace Prize. Gandhi could do without the Nobel Peace Prize. Whether Nobel committee can do without Gandhi is the question.

Display at the Museum

Besides the history of the Nobel Prize, the museum displays many gifts from many of the laureates. These include a letter from Albert Einstein confessing the inability of mathematical formulae to capture the nuances of human behaviour. There is a unique display of the kind of dresses used by celebrities while attending some of the banquets and many other details.

A guided tour lasting about 30 minutes shares interesting anecdotes from the lives of some of the laureates.

At the age of 17, Malala Yousafzai, is so far the youngest to have received a Nobel Peace Prize in 2014.

The Cultural Outreach

Being a symbol of scientific or literary achievement which is recognisable worldwide, the Nobel Prize is often depicted in fiction. In my younger days, I recall having read The Prize, a novel by Irwing Wallace. There have been films like The Prize (1963), Nobel Son (2007), and The Wife (2017) about fictional Nobel laureates, as well as fictionalised accounts of stories surrounding real prizes such as Nobel Chor (The Nobel Thief), a 2012 film based on the theft of Rabindranath Tagore’s prize. In a series named Genius (2017) on Netflix, a meeting between Albert Einstein and Marie Curie at one of the Nobel Prize ceremonies was depicted.

Improving the World

The Nobel Prize shows that ideas can change the world. The courage, creativity and perseverance of the Nobel Laureates inspire us and give us hope for the future.

Such initiatives help create exciting encounters between people – people who dare to challenge the status quo, who want to ask new questions, think new thoughts and contribute to a better world.

(Sources: The Nobel Museum guided tour and website, Wikipedia)

(Related Post:

Getting connected to Global Peace and Harmony

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When age is only a number

ashokbhatia

Often, we hear that age is a mere number,
But also wonder if it makes us dumb and dumber;
Unless proper and timely steps are taken through channels right,
The chances of our becoming dull happen to be bright.

The body needs all the care and affection it can get,
The mind needs to be kept active, not to forget;
The soul needs nourishment of a different kind,
Otherwise it is left in torment and in a bind.

The zeal of youth makes us leap light-heartedly into traps,
The spirit of adventure keeps us wandering off the known maps;
Romantics at heart, fragile in maturity, we jump at gold coins with strings attached,
We behave like zombies, often getting disappointed over chickens un-hatched.

 

When advanced in age, our optimism fades, no longer making the spirits lift,
A feeling grows that our guardian angels no longer care to bear a…

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An armchair view of physicians and patients

Those who practice as physicians in our society are increasingly looked upon with some suspicion. Dig a little deeper and one is apt to find that they are more to be pitied than to be censured.

A physician is denied the fundamental right to some solitude. Even at a social gathering, she is likely to be surrounded by wannabe patients who are keen to seek her impromptu advice as to the latest affliction the party of the other part has heard about and imagines oneself to be suffering from the same.

Close relatives are not too considerate either. A distant relative could call late at night, skillfully steering the conversation from children’s career prospects to the current bout of migraine she happens to be suffering from. If anyone in the circle of friends or relatives happens to be admitted to a hospital, the physician ends up spending sleepless nights, adroitly juggling her official commitments and personal relations, often messing up both.

Latest advancements in medicine keep them on their toes. So does the competition from various streams of medicine, such as Homeopathy, Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha and many other local variants of each of these streams. Superstitions, local beliefs, religion, social norms are but some of the constraints which need to be kept in mind. Legal tangles, such as those apply to road accident cases, keep them on the defensive.

In advanced countries, they face tough customer care regulations. In emerging economies like India, they suffer humiliation – occasionally violent – at the hands of irate relatives and well-wishers if the latter perceive the medical service provided to their kith and kin to be deficient.

Return on Investment considerations

To be a mere graduate in any discipline of medicine does not amount to much these days. Even to become a graduate, the hapless souls have to experience at least five and a half years of the tyranny of the classroom, with the trauma of a stint as an intern thrown in for good measure.

Monetary rewards obviously vary depending upon their choice of a career. They could choose to be in their own private practice, or join a private sector outfit, or become a part of the public health delivery mechanism.

If public spending on health infrastructure is woefully inadequate, private players end up playing an important role in the medical education scenario. Many aspiring physicians opt for a private sector skill provider. As a consequence, hassled parents end up shelling out sackfuls of the green stuff. Return on Investment considerations then determine the choice of their career.

The blue-eyed ones

The resourceful ones set up their own practice. If the going is good, some of them end up laughing all the way to the bank, what with hefty commissions coming in from such allied medical service providers as marketeers of branded medicines and diagnostic clinics.

Those who happen to be associated with five-star private sector health facilities have tough business targets to meet. This is not to say that patient care necessarily gets compromised, but an overdose of medical investigations surely leaves the patient and her family deprived of mental peace and some hard-earned green stuff.

When the costliest of medicines and gadgets get recommended by physicians, stakeholders of pharmaceutical companies and those in the field of medical equipment laugh all the way to the bank. Admittedly, quite a lot of money gets pumped into research and development, but it is open to debate as to how much profit could be considered rational and socially justified.

Much like the marketing honchos in the private sector who bring in business and resultant moolah, such physicians happen to be the blue-eyed boys of any entity which boasts of being a corporate facility.

The grey eyed ones

Physicians who are part of the government healthcare delivery system and happen to be conscientious by nature are often overloaded with work. Monetary rewards are often not commensurate with the efforts being put in. The eyes of a majority of them would be a dull grey, revealing a soul which is tormented and has given up hope.

Besides having to publish research papers in peer-reviewed journals and making presentations at medical seminars, students have to be guided, examinations have to be conducted and internal meetings need to be attended. Administrative chores cannot be ignored.

Above all, routine patient care cannot be made to suffer. Patients, whether of the ‘in’ or the ‘out’ kind, descend in droves, all eager to jump the queue and catch the attention of the physician. The plight of those in most of the emerging economies is most distressing because the per capita availability of physicians leaves much to be desired.

Of Attitude and Inner Resilience

Much depends on the attitude of a patient. One could come across persons with a cheerful disposition headed for their second open heart surgery, relishing a deep-fried item with much glee. One could also run into those who worry endlessly over such transient ailments as a bout of common cold or sinusitis.

Physicians obviously deal with a baffling variety of patients with much finesse and aplomb. Nerves of chilled steel get deployed. A sense of detachment pervades their handling of a patient. Their inner resilience deserves to be applauded.

With such fine qualities of head and heart, one can merely admire the quality of their work which keeps upholding the reputation of their profession. The Hippocratic Oath might appear to be relegated to the background, but is surely alive and kicking.

In many streams of alternative medicine, the patient is taken as a composite whole and treated holistically. The inner resilience of a patient is accorded a higher weightage. Allopathy, the mainstay of masses in the times we live in, does it the other way round, where each organ is looked at and treated separately. In mathematical parlance, alternative streams could be likened to Integral Calculus, whereas allopathy could be likened to Differential Calculus.

Shoring up one’s inner resilience

There are indeed ways for patients to improve one’s inner resilience, so as to be able to handle the harsh slings and arrows of Fate in a more positive manner. A deeper inner connection helps. To achieve the same, regular introspection and meditation helps.

As the Mother has said, the right approach would be to simply disallow negative thoughts to gain a foothold in one’s psychical system. Patients obviously need loads of patience to be able to put this advice in practice!

(Notes:

This forms part of an article which has appeared in NAMAH:

NAMAH_OCTOBER_2017

Inputs from Dr. Shivani Salil Dr. Shruti Bhatia are gratefully acknowledged.)

(Related Post: https://ashokbhatia.wordpress.com/2017/06/04/of-patient-satisfaction-quotient-motivation-and-kinds-of-patients)

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Of Patient Satisfaction Quotient, Motivation and Kinds of Patients

The Patient Satisfaction Quotient

It is well-known that the Patient Satisfaction Quotient is a function of various factors – the time spent with the physician, the quality of interaction had, the seniority of the physician in the system hierarchy, etc.

It follows that the following laws might apply:

Law #1: The more the time spent with a physician, the higher the level of satisfaction of a patient.

Admittedly, this law does not apply to those perched on a dentist chair. Nor does it apply to those facing a minor surgical procedure without the aid of analgesics.

Law #2: The better the quality of interaction, the higher the level of satisfaction of a patient.

This law is a direct derivative of the psychology of the individual. The more a patient is able to off-load her worries and anxieties onto the hapless physician, the happier she is apt to feel.

There are some exceptions here as well. A physician found making an inappropriate remark about the weight of a patient who is a member of the female of our species risks losing the latter’s goodwill.

Law #3: The patient satisfaction level is directly proportional to the seniority of the physician being consulted.

Amongst the well-heeled patients, the respect and admiration for a physician depends upon the amount of fee being charged, the waiting period to get an appointment, the seniority of the physician in the system, and the value as well as the rare availability of the medications being prescribed.

This one surely does not apply to the teeming multitudes who strive to keep their body and soul together day after day.

It follows that most patients using the public hospitals are left dissatisfied. It does not occur to them that the sheer exposure of such physicians is so very wide that the medical advice they dish out is much better. Superfluous investigations are discouraged. Medications recommended are often of a generic kind, saving the patient some precious money.

A Patient Motivation-Hygiene Proposition

Those familiar with Herzberg’s two-factor theory, popular in the realm of organizational behaviour, would notice a striking similarity between the situation envisaged in organizations and the one we are endeavouring to explore here.

In case of organizations, job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction are not part of a continuum. Absence of satisfaction does not necessarily imply presence of dissatisfaction. If the presence of Motivation Factors (respect and recognition on the job, for instance) improves job satisfaction levels, the absence of Hygiene Factors (such as physical working conditions, etc) leads to higher job dissatisfaction levels.

Likewise, satisfaction/dissatisfaction levels of patients perhaps tend to be independent of each other. If the treatment is effective in the long run, the satisfaction level improves. If the time spent by the physician is inadequate, dissatisfaction sets in.
In that sense, Effectiveness of Treatment would be akin to a Motivation Factor in the theory propounded by Herzberg.

However, the set of laws proposed above would be like Hygiene Factors, the absence of which would cause a patient dissatisfaction.

Patients of various hues

Patients obviously come in various body sizes, pocket sizes, shapes and hues. Amongst those who do not face a medical emergency, there are wide variations in temperaments. Here are some which might be of interest.

The Reluctant Ones

These are patients who believe that a doctor should be visited only as a last resort and that medicines need to be stopped as soon as the immediate problem is addressed. They believe that there is no need for any follow-up visit, till, of course, the next crisis strikes.

The Casual Ones

These are the ones who are casual in their approach. They may or may not follow either a doctor’s prescriptions or the food restrictions placed on them. Nevertheless, a medical consultation is akin to a pleasurable outing for the, so they shall keep coming back to see the physician. For a public service doctor, they happen to be a nuisance. For those in the private sector, they are a source of delight.

The Conscientious Ones

In this category fall the hapless and anxious souls who take their illnesses rather seriously. They take medicines regularly, and follow diet-related advice to the best of their ability. They tend to seek guidance at frequent intervals. Those who suffer from lifestyle diseases often end up forging a close bond with the physician, thereby replicating the age-old system of ‘family doctors’.

The Anxious Ones

Then there are the well-heeled hyper-anxious ones who take a magnified view of their afflictions, tend to be jumpy, worry excessively about prognosis, and keep troubling the physician concerned with inane queries from time to time.

(Notes:

This forms part of an article which has appeared in an issue of NAMAH:

NAMAH_OCTOBER_2017

Inputs from Dr Shivani Salil and Dr Shruti Bhatia are gratefully acknowledged)

(Related Post:

https://ashokbhatia.wordpress.com/2017/06/19/an-armchair-view-of-physicians-and-patients)

 

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When age is only a number

Often, we hear that age is a mere number,
But also wonder if it makes us dumb and dumber;
Unless proper and timely steps are taken through channels right,
The chances of our becoming dull happen to be bright.

 

The body needs all the care and affection it can get,
The mind needs to be kept active, not to forget;
The soul needs nourishment of a different kind,
Otherwise it is left in torment and in a bind.

 

The zeal of youth makes us leap light-heartedly into traps,
The spirit of adventure keeps us wandering off the known maps;
Romantics at heart, fragile in maturity, we jump at gold coins with strings attached,
We behave like zombies, often getting disappointed over chickens un-hatched.

 

When advanced in age, our optimism fades, no longer making the spirits lift,
A feeling grows that our guardian angels no longer care to bear a gift;
Our triumphs are many, but all sound mellowed and get under-rated,
The aged machinery creaks, a depression often seeps in unabated.

 

Each day, we shudder to look at a stranger in the mirror,
With brittle bones, fuzzy brains and a heart which is all of a twitter;
Different organs protest, the lining of the stomach seeks our regular attention,
Willing to try any system of medicine, keeping fit being the mere intention.

 

The mellow wisdom of advancing age we often forget to treat as an asset,
Giving back to society and relishing an inner glow before we walk into the sunset;
Doing what we always dreamed of doing does bring in a wholesome joy,
Listening to the body, nourishing it with a healthy diet, is the right ploy.

 

The world is still waiting with open arms, to be explored by us,
Glorious sunsets, resplendent seashores and deep gorges beckon us;
Sunshine eager to bathe us, gentle breeze to caress our wrinkled face,
River rapids and waterfalls aspire to spray us with natural grace.

 

Sleeping under the canopy of a star-studded sky on quiet nights,
The moon showering us with its soft azure rays with full might;
The sweet fragrance of flowers missed on the tortuous highway of life,
Await our attention in a lovely phase with minimum strife.

 

Time to take it easy and have a circle of friends around,
A tissue restorative on one side, a Plum book on the other, and our joy is unbound;
Soaking in the strains of soothing music and catching up on a classic movie,
An outpouring of creative juices, some light exercise, and life is groovy.

 

Basking in the inner glow of satisfaction, enjoying a deep sense of fulfillment,
For having crossed major landmarks of our lives on this firmament;
Oh, the freedom of soaring at will, free of the sap of life’s intricate bee-hives,
Pursuing our hobbies and passions dreamed of all through our lives.

 

Wondering if we can leave behind some marks on the shifting sands of time,
Motivating the coming generations to aspire beyond a penny and a dime;
Living the values, ethics, norms and beliefs we expect them to follow,
Always feeling positive, never believing that we lived our lives hollow.

 

(Related posts:

https://ashokbhatia.wordpress.com/2014/01/12/6-things-to-do-before-you-turn-60

https://ashokbhatia.wordpress.com/2016/01/10/ode-to-old-age)

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