What to expect in Episode 7
EP 7: Dr Claudio Jiménez | What's love got to do with it
Claudio Jiménez is director of stroke at Simon Bolivar Hospital in Bogota, Colombia. A neurologist and neurophysiologist, he’s dedicated himself to the care of stroke patients, and to supporting the establishment of stroke centers and networks throughout Colombia.
He says, “In Bogotá as a physician, you have a social responsibility. You can deny it. You can say, I don't want to do it, but you have it.”
The fight for better access to stroke care has moulded him into a campaigner for social justice in healthcare, not only in Colombia but everywhere the healthcare system fails to care for people as it should.
With a unique capacity for looking at the world and seeing both the science and the wonder, Claudio believes that it’s language that makes us human, and that poetry lights a candle in the mind.
He says, “The world we build and live in was built by language, poetry and music. Our language gives us the ability to construct a universe inside the universe. We can only do the things we do as a society because we have language and we can communicate.”
Preserving language and, with it, the ability to say to others that you love them, is a driving force in his battle against stroke.
In this episode
- Saving brain tissue saves the social fabric
- The social responsibility of a physician in Bogotá
- Many gods, one science
- Being raised by women
- Building memories with his daughter
- Why we need to read more poetry
- What love’s got to do with it
Listen below
For Claudio Jiménez, transforming stroke management at his public hospital in northern Bogotá has moulded his vision of quality healthcare for all in a caring society. But his view of the world is shaped by poets as diverse as Lucretius, Edgar Allan Poe and especially Walt Whitman. In a conversation recorded last October in Barcelona, Claudio explains how he coined the idea that saving brain tissue equals saving the social fabric – a statement that has become a way of thinking about stroke, particularly in his native Colombia.