Heading
- exert a subtle but immensely powerful control over those cared for
- Employing medical care in such an ambivalent manner—that is, to care for some of the patient’s needs and at the same time to oppress him
- mitigated by the intercessions of a relatively benevolent medical personnel
- admirably suited for “gently” keeping “in line” the discontented and dissenting members or groups of society.
- the way tensions generated in an oppressive social system are managed—and tranquilized
- This sort of homeostasis is displayed perhaps most obviously for us today in the classic autocratic-patriarchal family—where the father is a brutal tyrant, cruel and punitive toward his children, domineering and deprecatory toward his wife; and the mother is gentle, kind, and all-suffering, who, through her protective intercessions, makes life bearable for the children.
- In such a system, the protector—whether doctor or mother—not only shields the victim from the victimizer, but, by virtue of his or her very intervention, also shields the victimizer from the potentially more fully developed wrath of the victim. Such an intermediary thus serves to maintain a familial or political homeostasis, whose disruption may in turn depend heavily on the breakdown or cessation of the role of the intermediary.
- this arrangement—which gives enough power to both patients and doctors to harass each other, but not enough to alter their own situation—thus serves best the government that supports it.
- to control the wicked. Since sickness is often considered to be a form of wickedness, and wickedness a form of sickness, contemporary medical practices—in all countries regardless of their political makeup—often consist of complicated combinations of treatment and social control.
References
- Szazs, Thomas. (1961). The Myth of Mental Illness Chapter 3. The Social Context of Medical Practice (p. 127). New York, NY: HarperCollins.
Metadata
Type: Tags: Status:⛅️