The Conception Of Disease: Its History, Its Versions And Its Nature

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1953-01-01 edition. ... order of thought to the other cannot be silenced by simply and categorically stating that a single and unbroken unity is behind the two products of the split. Nor can the assumption of the equality of both these products prevent us from giving supremacy to thought and passion and from neglecting the body whenever an emergency arises and the patient but not his brain has to be explored and assisted. To make it the anatomical concept of disease does neither give an opening to an understanding in its proper terms of the patient as a human being in distress nor to his liberation attemped according to this understanding, thus, according to rules and art. But which role should be left to the lesions with which diseases are found to be associated, in other words, what may be the true significance of local destruction, is difficult to say. In fact, we have to deal with a particular instance of the body-mind relationship, thus with an insoluble problem. We are in conformity with the oldest and noblest tradition in medical thought and history by conceiving regional destructions as instrumental in the genesis of compound functional disorders or diseases which are not produced but only facilitated by lesions and which remain auto-nomic manifestations of life under special conditions. THE ETIOLOGIC CONCEPTION OF DISEASE82 EACH living being is born with an adequate equipment to live, to grow and to endure in its own environment, to meet emergencies and dangers and to secure a maximum of well-being under the ever changing conditions of an unreliable and sometimes hostile nature. The human race is born with an intellectual equipment, the most powerful tool of which is its faculty of raising questions. Natural forces, birth and death, health...