Medicine and Society

Quand il est question de santé et de soins, le salut, le mystère-cette chose insondable-, l'initiation et l'espace séparé, saint ne sont pas loin. Le mot sacré, à la dimension ambiguë de respect et de crainte, est automatiquement associé aux soins et aux soignants par la ...

Multiple student initiatives were developed in the Medical School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, under the guidance of the Laboratory of Primary Health Care, General Practice, and Health Services Research, as an answer to the increasing needs of the Greek National Health System during the pandemic. In one group, students were responsible for the phone call communication with patients of certain areas to book an appointment for a rapid test, announce the results of the test, monitor the symptoms and the health condition of patients with mild COVID-19 and inform the GPs of the health centers. At around the same time, in another group, senior medical students were enlisted as volunteers, and they were distributed to seven vaccination centers in two different Health Districts of Northern Greece. The vaccination process was significantly facilitated by the support of students in the initial data collection and recording of the personal medical history of the incoming citize...

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Quand il est question de santé et de soins, le salut, le mystère-cette chose insondable-, l'initiation et l'espace séparé, saint ne sont pas loin. Le mot sacré, à la dimension ambiguë de respect et de crainte, est automatiquement associé aux soins et aux soignants par la ...

Multiple student initiatives were developed in the Medical School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, under the guidance of the Laboratory of Primary Health Care, General Practice, and Health Services Research, as an answer to the increasing needs of the Greek National Health System during the pandemic. In one group, students were responsible for the phone call communication with patients of certain areas to book an appointment for a rapid test, announce the results of the test, monitor the symptoms and the health condition of patients with mild COVID-19 and inform the GPs of the health centers. At around the same time, in another group, senior medical students were enlisted as volunteers, and they were distributed to seven vaccination centers in two different Health Districts of Northern Greece. The vaccination process was significantly facilitated by the support of students in the initial data collection and recording of the personal medical history of the incoming citize...

was not, I suspect, an interesting man. He was the solid representative of his profession, and of his dynasty, during a substantial portion of the eighteenth century, the first name to be thought of in treating the mad, the physician to the first hospital to be thought of in housing the mad, as his father had been before him, and as his son was to be after him, and his grandson after that. But he was not in himself, apparently, remarkable, either for his exceptional energies, or for introducing changes in professional practices, or for being a terror to his patients or an outrageous profiteer. He seems to have had no more than standard-for his day-political views of a Tory cast, and to have conducted himself in his private and domestic life in a manner acceptable to his family, his friends and to society at large. His father, James, had been censored in print by one of his own patients, Alexander Cruden, as a Jacobite and an adulterer, but not John, who also treated Cruden and was also portrayed by him, generally favourably, in print. John was what he should be, no more and no less. If John is interesting, it is rather as a pane of glass is interesting, more for what is seen through it than for itself. John Monro's career-and he was physician at Bethlem between the death of his father in 1752 and his own effective retirement in 1787-coincided with a remarkable period in mad-doctoring: the increasing professionalisation of the 'mad-business', the slow progress towards legislation in housing the mad, the beginnings of innovations in treating mad patients and the emergence therefrom of the management movement, and above all changes in social attitudes towards the insane, all of which substantially realigned the pressures and assumptions under which the mad-doctor worked. Of these, John Monro certainly participated in the first, as did most of his prominent contemporaries. He had financial connections with several private London madhouses, up to the time when he became licensee of Brooke House in Chelsea, and conspicuously shared in the lucrative proceeds of this business. With regard to the other great shifts of his time, however, he appears to have been either neutral, a recipient of whatever legal or social changes were in progress, or else a passive impediment, as with therapeutic innovation. After decades of stagnation, something was happening with the mad, but it was not because of Monro. Here is the context for Jonathan Andrews' and Andrew Scull's Undertaker of the Mind. Having discovered John Monro's private case book for 1766, which is published as part of a separate volume, Customers and

George Gotsis 
                          Professor of Economics

  Ancient Chinese medicine as a foundation of public health crisis management in a pandemic era

Abstract
        This paper examines the significance of adopting ancient Chinese medical tradition as both an instrument of public health management policies and a means of securing and protecting human life in the current covid 19 pandemic circumstances. More specifically, the study is intended to explore the potential of Chinese medicine as a prospective justificatory basis of contemporary health crisis management. In this respect, we review the historical development of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), discuss its basic tenets and core principles and assess its efficiency in addressing critical challenges to human life in both the historical past and the present. 
      We then proceed to discuss in brief the implementation of health management programmes based on TCM in the current pandemics in China, underscore its admittedly beneficial outcomes and evaluate the efficacy of these policies in attenuating adverse effects induced by SARS Cov 2. TCM remains a functional and comprehensive belief-system informed by various methods and practices that is in position to yield positive outcomes in states of emergencies. Empirical findings centered on clinical trials as well as meta-analyses of published papers offer an advocacy of our initial hypothesis that resorting to an indigenous medical system is far from being an irrational or highly risky decision. On the contrary, we elaborate a set of arguments and advance a rationale in favour of such a choice in particular cultural contexts in which TCM enjoys a high level of institutionalization and social recognition.
        We then identified a multilevel rationale for potential inclusion of TCM in current crisis management in China. We thus identified eight particular arguments, namely a historical, an inductive, a consequentialist, an institutional, an inclusive, a pragmatist, a deontological and finally, a virtue ethics argument in justifying such a policy decision. In a current international environment in which competing vaccines strive for preeminence in view of more effectively addressing such an unpredictable challenge even to the most advanced medical systems, TCM remains a both invaluable asset and a common good on which we can draw to impede virus proliferation, insofar as TCM may enrich our tools employed against covid 19 and safeguard the priority of human life.

La píldora maravillosa (1971) de Jesús Pavlo Tenorio asevera que la humanidad arriesga su propia existencia cuando entiende la sexualidad en términos médicos y sociales en vez de morales. A diferencia de sus contemporáneos del movimiento de la onda, Tenorio veía los cambios morales del país de una manera pesimista y apocalíptica. El advenimiento de los anticonceptivos en los años 1960 hicieron posible que las parejas heterosexuales (casadas y no) pudieran tener relaciones sexuales sin preocuparse tanto por un embarazo inesperado. Los segmentos progresistas de la sociedad vieron este avance médico como libertador y responsable, pero Tenorio solamente vio un impulso egoísta de disfrutarse del placer del sexo sin aceptar la responsabilidad de repoblar el mundo. La premisa de la novela —que el uso global de los anticonceptivos provocará la esterilidad de la próxima generación— señala preocupaciones legítimas de incorporar ciertas prácticas médicas sin evaluar sus efectos. No obstante, el autor falla en articular el problema en términos médicos. Sus intentos de explicar la ciencia de la esterilización de masas demuestra su falta de entendimiento de cómo funcionan las píldoras anticonceptivas. Lo que resulta es lo que Thomas S. Kuhn denomina como una inconmensurabilidad semántica entre la religión y la ciencia, pues produce una narrativa de miedo que postula la destrucción de la humanidad como resultado justo del hedonismo. El aspecto seudocientífico y moralista de la novela la señala como un texto fascinante para mejor entender los debates morales que sobreabundaban en México durante los años 1960 y 1970.

Jesús Pavlo Tenorio’s novel La píldora maravillosa (1971) posits that humanity places its very existence in danger when it frames sexuality in medical/social rather than moral terms. Unlike its literary contemporaries from the countercultural onda movement, La píldora maravillosa takes a pessimistic, apocalyptic stance regarding the nation’s shifting moral values. The advent of contraception in the 1960s made it possible for heterosexual couples—both married and not—to engage in sexual activity with a heavily reduced risk of pregnancy. Progressive factors of society viewed this medical breakthrough as liberating for responsible people, but Tenorio saw only a selfish drive to enjoy the pleasures of sex while shirking the responsibility to repopulate the world. The novel’s premise—that mass usage of birth control will ultimately lead to the sterility of the next generation—taps into legitimate concerns about the incorporation of medical practices into society before fully gauging their effects. That said, the author fails to articulate his concerns in truly medical terms. His attempts to explain the science behind the mass sterilization of humanity exposes a fundamental lack of understanding about how birth control pills work. The result is what Thomas S. Kuhn refers to as a semantic incommensurability between medicine and religion: Tenorio employs fear-inducing narratives that frame humanity’s destruction as the just reward for hedonism. The novel’s pseudoscientific and moralistic approach to medicine make it a fascinating text for understanding the debates that abounded within Mexico during the 1960s and 1970s.