Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine

Disease is a social development no less than the medicine that combats it.

In Europe from Graeco-Roman antiquity onwards, and also among the great Asian civilizations, the medical profession systematically replaced transcendental explanations by positing a natural basis for disease and healing. Among educated lay people and physicians alike, the body became viewed as integral to law-governed cosmic elements and regular pr

Absent are the glib pronouncements and fuzzy circumlocutions that earlier writers had used to hide their ignorance.

As documented by Sherwin Nuland, clinical professor of surgery at Yale University and National Book Award winner for How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter, many Americans have fallen prey to the idea, now avidly marketed by many big players in the health care industry, that medicine can offer a remedy to nature.

This widespread tendency to rely on medicine for health solutions has been termed “medicalization,” which Professor Paula Lantz at the George Washington School of Public Health has succinctly defined as the mistaking of health care for health.