RECALL JACOB WAS CREATING A NEEDLEPOINT FROM HOMER'S POEM OF THE MANY FACETED MAN (MANY TALENTS), ULYSSES. AND WHAT DOES MILES WANT? WEALTH. AND HOW DOES IT COME? AS DIAMONDS OF MANY FACETS. DESMOND AND PENNY ARE ONE COUPLE DESMOND DOES MANY THINGS WELL. SAWYER IS ANOTHER MAN OF MANY FACETS. DOES THIS MEAN THEY WILL REUNITE? SAYID IS ANOTHER SUCH MAN OF MANY TALENTS.
THE PHILOSOPHER I. BERLIN CALLED SUCH PEOPLE FOXES; THEY KNOW MANY THINGS. THEN THERE ARE THE HEDGEHOGS WHO KNOW ONLY ONE THING: HOW TO BUILD HOLES THAT FOXES CANNOT ENTER.
HURLEY, THE HUMAN LOCKE, BEN, JACK ARE ONE TRICK PONIES: TALKING TO THE DEAD, BOUNDLESS FAITH, MATCHLESS LYING, SPINAL SURGERY. what tricks they are! THE HEDGEHOG CAN BE A MARVEL. BERLIN PICKS DOSTOYEVSKY: FULL OF FAITH THAT CONSTANTLY IS DEFEATED BY ILLNESS, TREASON, MISFORTUNE, ADDICTION TO GAMBLING. IT IS SAID THAT HE DICTATED HIS GREATEST WORK TO HIS WIFE BETWEEN CONVULSIONS: THE HEDGEHOG WHO SEEMS A FOX. MARVEL AT THEIR GIFTS.
WHERE DO WE PUT FRANK (SEEMS A FOX), MILES (NOT THE MOST COMPETENT HEDGEHOG), JIN (NOT QUITE SURE), AND FARADAY (AS BERLIN STATES THERE ARE FOXES THAT TRY TO BECOME HEDGEHOGS; BERLIN SITES TOLSTOY).
martedì 16 marzo 2010
sabato 13 marzo 2010
another direction
A Brief and Peculiar Introduction
This is the story of Western Medicine before it became what we think of as medicine. We begin with the earliest history of the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean as the Greeks saw it. This is a strange journey that begins in the forest of philosophy, which opens to a great mountain that we call physics, and ends in the vast plain of medicine. We end with the union of biology with medicine and maturation of biology as an inductive science.
There are only three sciences. First there was physics. Then from physics and alchemy came chemistry. Biology sprung from “natural philosophy” and the proof that the laws of physics and chemistry applied equally to living and non-living things. Mathematics is how science expresses itself after it has gone beyond simple description (which is a very difficult thing). It’s hard to be objective in your description, and it’s even harder to induce from specific examples general rules. Science is an inductive process. It goes from the specific to the general. Conversely, deduction applies the rules derived from induction to produce a specific conclusion about a particular case. For example, you purchase a book which describes all the ducks found on the coast of Virginia. You have purchased someone’s descriptions and the inductions derived from these specific observations. Now you may make deductions based on previous inductive reasoning. Medicine is traditionally deductive: from the general to the specific case.
The history of medicine has three fundamental themes. This first is the difficulty medicine has had separating itself from religion. The second is the defense of medicine as a materialistic and empiric discipline. Medicine must not go from theory to practice; it must go from experience to standards of practice. The third is that medicine is scientific only when it can free itself from cultural, political and social constraints. This book is not only about medicine as it is practiced today; they concern what people in Europe, the Near East, and Northern Africa thought about health and disease for more than four thousand years. For the first three millennia, most of medicine was divided between the mysteriously divine and the obviously practical. In the last 400 years medicine has struggled to become a scientific discipline. A little over hundred years ago, European medicine became world medicine. Less than two hundred years ago, the words science and medicine became linked, that latter being seen as a part of the former in theory as well as practice only by a handful of intellectuals in the first of these two centuries. Only since World War I has the term “scientific medicine” entered into common usage by educated persons.
My division of chapters corresponds to demarcations within European history. We use as our standard Arnold Toynbee’s list of civilizations (Toynbee – A Study of History, (single volume) Toynbee and Caplan editors, Oxford, 1972 page. 72). The oldest civilizations are Sumero-Akkadian, Egyptiac, Aegean, Indus, and Sinic. Medicine without demonology began after the first four had faded. In the Spanish contact with the New World we encounter Middle American and Andean Civilizations which still clung to demons just as their conquerors did. Modern medicine, for better or for worse, has no use for angels or demons. At least, that’s the party line.
We are the heirs of the Syriac (primarily the tiny group of Hebrews) and of the Hellenic civilization as well as its many descendents. Toynbee does not make a clean division between Hellenic, Hellenistic, and Roman. In the discussion of Islam we encounter the Nestorian Christian and the Monophysite Christian; these Christian taught the Muslims much, including Greek medicine. In the early Western civilization, we encounter the Far Western Christian, the Orthodox Christian and the Russian Civilizations. These were the vessels that preserved medicine during the centuries of calamities after the Fall of Rome. It is recommended that the reader take a look at Toynbee’s 1972 summation not for its conclusions, but for its lists, chronologies, and maps. There is no better introduction to the idea of World History.
As for time, it needs to be dissected. This is a very simple process. The criterion is the dominant material of any epoch. Let us leave the time before man to others and begin with stone. The “Old” Stone Age may be defined by its painting; the New Stone Age by how humans fed themselves. The rest of history up until the last half of the nineteenth century by two metals: bronze and iron. After the nineteenth century two sources of energy become the defining elements of world civilization: petroleum becomes dominant; the energy of the atomic nucleus seems too frightening to utilize except under controlled conditions for energy and uncontrollable human enmity. Let those who prefer metaphors call it the Age of the Faustian Bargain. The Iron Age began roughly three to four thousand years before our history begins and ended sometime between 1900 and the Hiroshima. It’s over; and with it, a whole new part of modern history begins. There is no more Chinese or American history, there is only World History. Technology (the use of electromagnetic spectrum) and energy seem to have put an end to the local or national societies; we all live in multi-cultural global society. Pluralism, as we will see, is one of modern medicine’s main obstacles. How does one impose a product of European civilization on the rest of the world?
History is written, stamped with a date from a calendar, and got started about 2800 BC. The subject is principally the history of Western Medicine in the Iron Age. However, the first two thousand years is fragmentary and will be seen as such in retrospect by the Greeks. We begin, in earnest, between in the space between Italy and western Asia Minor in 800BC.
It is a strange journey that begins in the forest of philosophy, which opens to a valley that we call physics, and ends in a vast meadow of medicine. Indeed, this is a vary strange book. But the simple fact is that people have gotten the protagonists in the debate over evolution confused. First, it’s not just evolution, there’s natural selection, learning, language, and adaptation to consider. Just because one accepts one or more of these terms does not mean that one accepts them all. Secondly, the contest was never between Mr. Darwin and God, the combatants were Mr. Darwin and Aristotle. Finally, we will see that whether God exists or not, whether He flicked a switch, programmed a set of rules, and retired to another universe or if He is “hands on” 24/7” makes little difference.
The relationships between the religions that emerged from Semitic people and the medical paradigms that emerged from the various Hellenic civilizations are so intertwined that separation is not possible. Judaism and Christianity cannot exclude Islam. The elaborate rituals of purification enshrined in Hebrew custom and the ethnic elitism of the Greeks is part of this same legacy.
Islam is part of the West. Its birthplace is the same as its predecessors. Nor can any of these religions ignore the contribution of the Greek mind to their success. In fact, religion seems far more inclusive than medicine. The failure of medicine to take into account the mind and the soul indicates a significant problem: a gross defect in neurology compared to other systemic disciplines within medicine.
This author has no interest in publishing explanations and apologies for rigorous criticism of religion, government, science, or any category of human folly. Nor do I offer apologies to any members of occupation, any national units, any particular creeds. My mercy is strained; my skill is offense (those paraphrases are taken from Shakespeare). My genuine praise is noticeable; it is rare. My ironic laudatory passages are notable for their frequencies.
This is the story of Western Medicine before it became what we think of as medicine. We begin with the earliest history of the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean as the Greeks saw it. This is a strange journey that begins in the forest of philosophy, which opens to a great mountain that we call physics, and ends in the vast plain of medicine. We end with the union of biology with medicine and maturation of biology as an inductive science.
There are only three sciences. First there was physics. Then from physics and alchemy came chemistry. Biology sprung from “natural philosophy” and the proof that the laws of physics and chemistry applied equally to living and non-living things. Mathematics is how science expresses itself after it has gone beyond simple description (which is a very difficult thing). It’s hard to be objective in your description, and it’s even harder to induce from specific examples general rules. Science is an inductive process. It goes from the specific to the general. Conversely, deduction applies the rules derived from induction to produce a specific conclusion about a particular case. For example, you purchase a book which describes all the ducks found on the coast of Virginia. You have purchased someone’s descriptions and the inductions derived from these specific observations. Now you may make deductions based on previous inductive reasoning. Medicine is traditionally deductive: from the general to the specific case.
The history of medicine has three fundamental themes. This first is the difficulty medicine has had separating itself from religion. The second is the defense of medicine as a materialistic and empiric discipline. Medicine must not go from theory to practice; it must go from experience to standards of practice. The third is that medicine is scientific only when it can free itself from cultural, political and social constraints. This book is not only about medicine as it is practiced today; they concern what people in Europe, the Near East, and Northern Africa thought about health and disease for more than four thousand years. For the first three millennia, most of medicine was divided between the mysteriously divine and the obviously practical. In the last 400 years medicine has struggled to become a scientific discipline. A little over hundred years ago, European medicine became world medicine. Less than two hundred years ago, the words science and medicine became linked, that latter being seen as a part of the former in theory as well as practice only by a handful of intellectuals in the first of these two centuries. Only since World War I has the term “scientific medicine” entered into common usage by educated persons.
My division of chapters corresponds to demarcations within European history. We use as our standard Arnold Toynbee’s list of civilizations (Toynbee – A Study of History, (single volume) Toynbee and Caplan editors, Oxford, 1972 page. 72). The oldest civilizations are Sumero-Akkadian, Egyptiac, Aegean, Indus, and Sinic. Medicine without demonology began after the first four had faded. In the Spanish contact with the New World we encounter Middle American and Andean Civilizations which still clung to demons just as their conquerors did. Modern medicine, for better or for worse, has no use for angels or demons. At least, that’s the party line.
We are the heirs of the Syriac (primarily the tiny group of Hebrews) and of the Hellenic civilization as well as its many descendents. Toynbee does not make a clean division between Hellenic, Hellenistic, and Roman. In the discussion of Islam we encounter the Nestorian Christian and the Monophysite Christian; these Christian taught the Muslims much, including Greek medicine. In the early Western civilization, we encounter the Far Western Christian, the Orthodox Christian and the Russian Civilizations. These were the vessels that preserved medicine during the centuries of calamities after the Fall of Rome. It is recommended that the reader take a look at Toynbee’s 1972 summation not for its conclusions, but for its lists, chronologies, and maps. There is no better introduction to the idea of World History.
As for time, it needs to be dissected. This is a very simple process. The criterion is the dominant material of any epoch. Let us leave the time before man to others and begin with stone. The “Old” Stone Age may be defined by its painting; the New Stone Age by how humans fed themselves. The rest of history up until the last half of the nineteenth century by two metals: bronze and iron. After the nineteenth century two sources of energy become the defining elements of world civilization: petroleum becomes dominant; the energy of the atomic nucleus seems too frightening to utilize except under controlled conditions for energy and uncontrollable human enmity. Let those who prefer metaphors call it the Age of the Faustian Bargain. The Iron Age began roughly three to four thousand years before our history begins and ended sometime between 1900 and the Hiroshima. It’s over; and with it, a whole new part of modern history begins. There is no more Chinese or American history, there is only World History. Technology (the use of electromagnetic spectrum) and energy seem to have put an end to the local or national societies; we all live in multi-cultural global society. Pluralism, as we will see, is one of modern medicine’s main obstacles. How does one impose a product of European civilization on the rest of the world?
History is written, stamped with a date from a calendar, and got started about 2800 BC. The subject is principally the history of Western Medicine in the Iron Age. However, the first two thousand years is fragmentary and will be seen as such in retrospect by the Greeks. We begin, in earnest, between in the space between Italy and western Asia Minor in 800BC.
It is a strange journey that begins in the forest of philosophy, which opens to a valley that we call physics, and ends in a vast meadow of medicine. Indeed, this is a vary strange book. But the simple fact is that people have gotten the protagonists in the debate over evolution confused. First, it’s not just evolution, there’s natural selection, learning, language, and adaptation to consider. Just because one accepts one or more of these terms does not mean that one accepts them all. Secondly, the contest was never between Mr. Darwin and God, the combatants were Mr. Darwin and Aristotle. Finally, we will see that whether God exists or not, whether He flicked a switch, programmed a set of rules, and retired to another universe or if He is “hands on” 24/7” makes little difference.
The relationships between the religions that emerged from Semitic people and the medical paradigms that emerged from the various Hellenic civilizations are so intertwined that separation is not possible. Judaism and Christianity cannot exclude Islam. The elaborate rituals of purification enshrined in Hebrew custom and the ethnic elitism of the Greeks is part of this same legacy.
Islam is part of the West. Its birthplace is the same as its predecessors. Nor can any of these religions ignore the contribution of the Greek mind to their success. In fact, religion seems far more inclusive than medicine. The failure of medicine to take into account the mind and the soul indicates a significant problem: a gross defect in neurology compared to other systemic disciplines within medicine.
This author has no interest in publishing explanations and apologies for rigorous criticism of religion, government, science, or any category of human folly. Nor do I offer apologies to any members of occupation, any national units, any particular creeds. My mercy is strained; my skill is offense (those paraphrases are taken from Shakespeare). My genuine praise is noticeable; it is rare. My ironic laudatory passages are notable for their frequencies.
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