The Day I Learned What Empathy Truly Means | by ThunderThinker | Oct, 2025

It’s actually a funny story.

I was in my first year of med school – just joined. Our government had started a new program called the Foundation Course.

Before our batch, every new student used to go straight into the dissection hall.

If you don’t know, that’s the anatomy department – the place where we see the words:

“Mortui Vivos Docent” – The dead teach the living.

Every medical student has great memories from the dissection hall, but we’ll talk about that another day.

The Foundation Course was an orientation program, meant to ease every student into the medical journey and teach some soft skills during the first month.

In this program, we had one lecture on empathy – my first ever encounter with that word.

We were all sitting in the classroom, and I saw this word on the digital screen in front of me.

Curious, I googled it before our psychiatry professor came in.

Google couldn’t answer it accurately – it gave a meaning more similar to sympathy than empathy.

I only realized that in hindsight.

After some time, the teacher came and started the lecture.

The first question was, “What is empathy?”

Initially, no one raised their hand.

Having just googled it a few minutes earlier, I thought giving the answer would make a good impression.

So I raised my finger, and the teacher said, “Please explain.”

I repeated Google’s answer, thinking the teacher might be impressed.

Well, the teacher smiled and said,

“Beta, the answer you gave would be correct if the question was, ‘What is sympathy?’ – and that is exactly why we are having this lecture.”

I felt a little embarrassed at that moment, but it became an important lesson.

If you don’t know the difference between sympathy and empathy, let me give you a little definition.

Sympathy is when you feel sorry for another person’s loss.

Empathy is when you yourself feel what the other person is going through.

Showing empathy is a great quality in any person, but it becomes even more important in my profession – as a doctor.

Since that day, I’ve been trying to cultivate empathy, and I still feel grateful for that one incident during my foundation course.

Empathy is listening to the whole story – not quickly reaching conclusions.

Empathy is a sprinkle of water on another person’s burning sorrow, not just a simple phrase like “Oh, I’m sorry for your loss.”

Empathy is not just a helping hand; it’s weeping with the other person.

And I have seen and felt this – both in real life and as a doctor myself.

Thank you for taking the time to read my little story about empathy. 🌿

This image was generated by AI when I asked it to show empathy.

Turns out, even AI is on its journey – learning, like us, to move from sympathy to empathy. Still long way ahead.

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