Medicine (Lapham's Quarterly 2-04, 2009)

 Lapham's’s Quarterly 2-04: Medicine (2009) Some random thoughts in response to this collection:

Archeologists and paleontologists have found evidence of care for the sick dating back millennia before the earliest medical texts. That care, and the signs of intentional burial, were both at one time believed to be species-specific behaviour. Observation of chimpanzees and elephants have blurred that picture, but there’s no doubt that humans have taken medicine very seriously. Every known society gives medical practitioners a special role and responsibility. The roles of physician and the priest are often combined. Cures are often understood as miracles: It’s not surprising that many of Jesus’s miracles were cures.

Through most of our history, what made us sick and what kept us well was summed up in precepts based on random observation. The history of medicine as a science is a nice example of how we humans strive to make sense of inadequate and often unreliable data. The first attempts to create a theoretical framework, the four humours, that might guide the practitioner to diagnose and treat unknown conditions we now know got it wrong. But based on the available data, it was reasonable. After all, whatever insight is claimed in one domain must match or at least not clash with whatever insights are claimed in another. The four humours of Greco-Roman medicine made sense, given what engineers and carpenters and farmers knew about how the material world worked, and what philosophers said about the four elements tied it all together..

Through most of history, medical practice dealt mostly with ameliorating symptoms. Sickness would strike without warning, and pandemics were common. I think it’s difficult for us to imagine the terror that sudden illness would provoke. The reactions to covid-19 show that nowadays we suffer not from the superstitious fear of plagues, but from the superstitious confidence that they won’t kill us.

Quacks have been with us from the beginning. Nowadays, many of them wear the mantel of wellness. I think quackery succeeds because science doesn’t provide the certainty people want from theories of Life, the Universe and Everything (TLUEs). The life sciences are especially prone to revise theories and replace them with more complicated ones. Quacks promise simplicity and certainty wrapped in pseudo-scientific jargon designed to create the illusion that here, at last, we have the Truth. “Natural” figures prominently in their claims. I guess most people just don’t know that the most lethal substances known are all natural. Mother Nature wins again. She always does.

Another wonderfully diverse collection. ****