Description
The healing tradition in Western medicine goes back to its origins. Asclepius was a legendary Greek physician—the son of Apollo and Coronis (a human). His fi rst teacher and foster parent was the wise centaur Chiron. When Asclepius became so skillful in healing that he could revive the dead (considered a crime against the natural order), Zeus killed him. Even though most physicians have no idea why Apollo and Asclepius are mentioned when they take whatever variant of the Hippocratic Oath is used in their medical school, their presence in the oath affi rms a tradition of physician-healers of more than 2500 years. During my fellowship, Walsh McDermott, the Chair of the Department, said that the chance that a patient entering a physician’s offi ce would be decisively aff ected by the visit dated to only 1925 (the discovery of insulin). Despite my endless respect for McDermott, I thought that improbable. Any system of medicine that lasts 2500 years must be doing something, and that something is probably more than merely an unlettered placebo eff ect. (As though we actually know how the placebo eff ect works.) On the other hand, we have little knowledge of what physicians have been doing all this time that might have been eff ective. (Some clues are off ered in Chapter 5.)
In the twentieth century in the United States the words healer and healing acquired a negative connotation starting in the 1920s, largely, at least in the beginning, as a result of the crusade by Morris Fishbein, the aggressive editor of Th e Journal of the American Medical Association from 1924 to 1949. Fishbein labeled anything that was not strictly scientifi c medicine as quackery, and healing fell under that heading. Th at attitude became quite general. As the twentieth century advanced, science and technology took over medicine. Science also entered and became infl uential in the intellectual life of Western society. Th e power of science to answer humankind’s important questions (sickness and disease fi t in here) was reinforced by Positivism, which started in the mid-nineteenth century. For positivists, “every rationally justifi able assertion can be scientifi cally verifi ed or is capable of logical or mathematical proof ” ( Oxford English Dictionary , 2nd ed.,electronic). As the hold of positivism weakened in the late twentieth century, that strict, and practically ideological, hold on intellectual and scientifi c life diminished. It has not diminished in medicine, however, where the scientifi c viewpoint that the only information of value is the verifi ably objective has gotten stronger. This has paid off in the hugely successful enterprise of medical science in its pursuit of knowledge about body function and disease.