Medicine and culture : proceedings of a historical symposium organized jointly by the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine, London, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, New York / edited by F.N.L. Poynter.

Date:
1969
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Medicine and culture : proceedings of a historical symposium organized jointly by the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine, London, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, New York / edited by F.N.L. Poynter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Medicine's Contribution to Culture breed in them a déformation professionelle but it makes a useful contribution to society, because it keeps alive a view which might otherwise be hidden by other views, equally partial and often more dangerous; for example, views of human relations based not on the rights and duties of the parties but on the degrees of power they command or the kinds of passion they inspire. It also ensures that there will be interested and informed participants in the endless dialogue by which these rights and duties are constantly redefined. This view of fellow man which distinguishes the lawyer is not something which schools of law choose to teach. It is a viewpoint which the study and practice of the law cannot help teaching, though it can be enlarged and offset to some extent by other training and experience designed to supplement it. Much the same is true, I believe, of medicine. The study and practice of medicine, as of law, must necessarily focus the doctor's attention on aspects of his fellow men which they ought not to focus on, yet which they should not be allowed to forget or ignore. And medical education, like legal education, must do what it can to save its devotees from the worst results of their devotion. But the view inherent in medicine is inescapably complex. The doctor is concerned with disordered biological organisms. He is also concerned with sentient individual humans dealing with their own and each other's disorders. He is also concerned with the threats and the supports offered to his patients by their surroundings, not least by each other. He is thus concerned with at least three levels of organisation, each with its own sciences, its own literature and its own mystique. He has too much on his plate. Worse than that, he has too much on each of the three plates. And of all human resources, attention is the least divisible. He tends to focus on one; and the one he can least afford to neglect today is the first. Three major factors seem to me to have put medicine into its present dilemma. I will call them, the emergence of the man-made environment; the emergence of technological man; and the passing of the Cartesian world. I will try to say something about all three; though this puts me in far worse case than the doctor with his three overladen plates. They are significant for us; and they may have different meanings in cultures where the first two changes may come far more quickly than they have with us and where the Cartesian phase of our culture may never occur. Dr. Galdston has described how the Greek concept of health gave way under the impact of the 'crowd diseases'. For 2000 years, throughout the cultures where this concept ruled, medicine taught that health was the natural result of living according to the laws of nature, that nature of which man was a part but not a manipulator.