Despite all of culture’s many advances, trying to understand and process the problem of human pain and suffering remains one of life’s most vexing challenges.

But occasionally, we’re able to connect a few dots and catch a small glimpse of what the Lord might have been up to in an individual’s affliction.

Such was the case with Dr. George Berci, who was born Gyorgy Bleier on March 14, 1921, in Szeged, Hungary, and who died at the age of 103 this past August.

The death of Dr. Berci captured a few headlines. Of course, at 103 years of age, his passing wasn’t surprising – though the fact he continued working past the century mark at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles was a regular subject of fascination and a testimony to his constitution and commitment.

George Berci’s claim to fame is that he adapted a video camera that revolutionized certain types of surgeries.

Working at a hospital in Melbourne, Australia, in 1962, Dr. Berci’s invention forever changed the way invasive endoscopies and laparoscopies were done, allowing doctors to easily look on a television screen rather than peer through a telescope. He didn’t invent the camera – he adapted an existing one and placed it on the end of a flexible tube.

“Dr. Berci brought a precise eye and an inventor’s zeal to innovations that enabled doctors to better visualize the bladder, colon, esophagus, prostate, common bile duct and other body parts,” wrote Richard Sandomir in The New York Times.

In addition to his video endoscopic microscope, he devised video laryngoscopes for intubation, as well as scissors and graspers used for endoscopies.

These inventions didn’t just revolutionize surgeries of a certain type, but wound up saving countless lives due to the new precision and accuracy that the new technology allowed.

Yet in looking back across Dr. Berci’s life, it’s clear it was religious discrimination, along with pain and suffering, that helped turn him into a groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting inventor.

Blocked from medical school because he was Jewish, George instead took a job in electrical and later in mechanical engineering. It wasn’t glamorous work, nor was it the career field he wanted to pursue at the time but the assignments proved to be life changing – and life saving.

It was during those years in the 1940s that George developed the skills and experience he would need to become the pioneering surgeon of the 1960s.

Dr. Berci was sent to a slave labor camp during World War II, and eventually became a member of the Hungarian underground resistance. He helped relocate Jews who were in hiding with forged paperwork.

After the war, he attended and graduated from the University of Szeged Medical School, and then escaped his homeland after the Soviet Union put down the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. Settling in Austria, he received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in experimental surgery and then settled in Australia. He knew no English, but slowly learned the language by mastering 120 words a day over the course of six months.

Dr. Berci emigrated to the United States in 1967 and began work at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles. He was associated with the hospital until his death last month.

Said Dr. Bruce Gewertz, the hospital’s surgeon in chief, “His achievements in the last 20 years of his life are probably as important as in the first 80.”

It was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who observed, “A hard life improves the vision.”

Life is full of challenges and hardship. Yet one of the keys to enjoying the journey is seeing the obstacles and the sorrows we endure as part of God’s larger plan. Instead of asking, “Why is this happening to me?” instead ask, “What are You trying to teach me”? or “How are You planning to use this for Your greater glory and good?”

We don’t always see what He’s up to – but there can be purpose in pain and a divine story and significance in sadness.

Image credit: Cedars-Sinai Los Angeles