How the current shape of healthcare can learn much from investigating Renaissance perspectives on the human condition, and the manner in which humanists describe this condition.
Combining medical insights with ancient texts to understand past diseases. Francesco Galassi, a paleopathographist, explains its promise: Palaeopathography is a unique opportunity for palaeopathology, since it allows the investigation of symptoms and signs of diseases, vital for medicine, yet unavailable when only studying ancient bones or mummies. This is especially viable with famous historical figures [...]
Historians and health care: how the humanities can heal, body and soul. From the article: From my particular hospital bed, it seemed increasingly, blindingly clear how much humanities and sciences – in this case history and medicine – truly complemented each other. As Gretchen Busl wrote last year, training in the humanities teaches us “the language necessary [...]
Addressing or dismissing the anxieties of conscience: is this the purview of medical science? Or of other therapy? In our time (this is truth, and it is significant for the Christianity of our time), in our time it is the physician who exercises the cure of souls. People have perhaps an unfounded dread of calling in [...]
Medicine, morality, and suffering: what can experience teach us about medical objectivity? “There is no real difference between a warm, snug study and this ward,” said Andrey Yefimitch. “A man's peace and contentment do not lie outside a man, but in himself.” “What do you mean?” “The ordinary man looks for good and evil [...]
Contrasting the approaches in Eastern and Western medicine.
Healthy living from technology and modern science: how the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative would change history within the next generation. “Can we work together to cure, prevent or manage all disease within our children’s lifetime?” Chan said Wednesday onstage at an event in San Francisco for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. “Mark and I believe that this is possible.” Chan, a [...]
The arts of medicine: for those in the healing field, knowing their patients requires more than the natural sciences. From the article: "[T]oday’s medical curriculum teaches new doctors about culture and communication. It is no longer good enough – and probably never was – for a doctor to simply know the appropriate medication to prescribe or diagnostic test [...]
Egyptian knowledge, health, and piety: Herodotus, the Greek "Father of History," remarks on Egyptian learning and character. The Egyptians who live in the cultivated parts of the country, by their practice of keeping records of the past, have made themselves the most learned any nation of which I have had experience. I will describe some of [...]
How language -- its clarity, immediacy, and nuance -- is vital to both patients and doctors, for it can overcome the split between scientific specialization and the experience of suffering. From the article: Many of the great doctors have been writers, and those who have not have required writers to set down their insights. Hippocrates, Galen, [...]
