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Medical Messages
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14978 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1988 |
3,873 Words |
| Author
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Russell Schoch
Russell Schoch is the editor of California Monthly and writes
frequently on topics in the field of medicine. |
THE ILLNESS NARRATIVES
Suffering, Healing and the Human Condition
Arthur Kleinman, M.D.
New York: Basic Books, 1988
284 pp. $19.95
THE SECOND MEDICAL REVOLUTION
From Biomedicine to Infomedicine
Laurence Foss and Kenneth Rothenberg
Boston: Shambhala, 1987
335 pp. $29.95
An exchange of views that continues to resonate two decades later took place in 1968 at a New York Academy of Sciences conference on the "Psychophysiological Aspects of Cancer." In the wrap-up discussion of the endocrine, immune and nervous systems, Dr. Harley Shands stood up to say that the "symbolic system," the thoughts and feelings of a human being, must be accorded full consideration as well.
To which Dr. Jonas Salk responded: "All right, then, how are you going to get that symbolic system to make cancer?"
To which Dr. Shands replied: "Isn't that just the point?"
Yes, that is just the point: Can the mind (the symbolic system) bring about disease ("make cancer")? In the twenty years since that exchange of views, there have been increasing challenges to the narrowness of the biomedical model, which insists that the only relevant messages are those that can be read by sophisticated technologies. Messages that cannot be so quantified--the psychological and sociological influences on our well being--have tended to fall by the wayside, to be picked up by various alternative therapies that themselves rise and fall in popularity.
Two recently published books, written from far-differing vantage points, take up the issue of medical messages. Although neither book has received much in the way of general review or commentary, both deserve a wide reading.
The first, Arthur Kleinman's The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the Human Condition, focuses on the problem of chronic illness. Whereas modern medicine has scored its greatest triumphs (and earned its reputation) in the battle against acute
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