I have always understood that money made in the patent medicine business is a practical bar to social success.
George Presbury RowellTags: humor history advertising medicine
Long before there were effective treatments, physicians dispensed prognoses, hope, and, above all, meaning. When something terrible happens-and serious disease is always terrible-people want to know why. In a pantheistic world, the explanation was simple-one god had caused the problem, another could cure it. In the time since people have been trying to get along with only one God, explaining disease and evil has become more difficult. Generations of theologians have wrestled with the problem of theodicy-how can a good God allow such bad things to happen to good people?
Darwinian medicine can't offer a substitute for such explanations. It can't provide a universe in which events are part of a divine plan, much less one in which individual illness reflects individual sins. It can only show us why we are the way we are, why we are vulnerable to certain diseases. A Darwinian view of medicine simultaneously makes disease less and more meaningful. Diseases do not result from random or malevolent forces, they arise ultimately from past natural selection. Paradoxically, the same capacities that make us vulnerable to disease often confer benefits. The capacity for suffering is a useful defense. Autoimmune disease is a price of our remarkable ability to attack invaders. Cancer is the price of tissues that can repair themselves. Menopause may protect the interests of our genes in existing children. Even senescence and death are not random, but compromises struck by natural selection as it inexorably shaped out bodies to maximize the transmission of our genes. In such paradoxical benefits, some may find a gentle satisfaction, even a bit of meaning-at least the sort of meaning Dobzhansky recognized. After all, nothing in medicine makes sense except in the light of evolution.
Tags: evolution medicine disease god-s-will dobzhansky
The doctors found out that Bunbury could not live, that is what I mean - so Bunbury died.
He seems to have had great confidence in the opinion of his physicians. I am glad, however, that he made up his mind at the last to some definite course of action, and acted under proper medical advice.
Therapy to life: Eat with the wise, and drink with the fools!
Anthony LiccioneTags: medicine fools food-for-thought lessons company relaxation content eat therapy drunkeness gaining-wisdom
First do no harm. -Hippocrates
Second, do some good. -Anne M. Lipton, M.D., Ph.D.
Tags: medicine medical-doctor
Nature had found the perfect place to hide the yellow fever virus. It seeded itself and grew in the blood, blooming yellow and running red.
Molly Caldwell CrosbyTags: history death death-and-dying medicine disease death-and-sickness disease-prevention yellow-fever
In the middle of the cemetery is a grassy plane, strangely vacant. There are no granite tombs or crumbling concrete, just a sun-washed treeless patch of green known as "No Man's Land." Here 1,500 unidentified bodies are buried. At one time, their skin burned with yellow fever; now they lie in a cool, dark place where long ago their arms and legs, hands and feet, were intertwined for eternity.
Molly Caldwell CrosbyTags: death-and-dying medicine graveyard graveyards yellow yellow-fever elmwood
I laugh for sheer medicinal purposes; because I feel I might die otherwise.
Richelle E. GoodrichTags: laughter medicine laugh laughing richelle richelle-goodrich
The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future — must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm.
HippocratesTags: science future harm time medicine disease physician antecedents
James Parkinson. George Huntington. Robert Graves. John Down. Now this Lou Gehrig fellow of mine. How did men come to monopolize disease names too?
Khaled Hosseini« first previous
Page 16 of 20.
next last »
Data privacy
Imprint
Contact
Diese Website verwendet Cookies, um Ihnen die bestmögliche Funktionalität bieten zu können.