The need for Holism 2.0 ... (c/o Porter, 1997)

 or 4.0?

"Disease became conceptualized after 1900 as a social no less than a biological phenomenon, to be understood statistically, sociologically, psychologically - even politically. Medicine's gaze had to incorporate wider questions of income, lifestyle, diet, habit, employment education and family structure - in short, the entire psycho-social economy. Only thus could medicine meet the challenges of mass society, supplanting outmoded clinical practice and transcending the shortsightedness of a laboratory medicine preoccupied with minute investigation of lesions but indifferent as to how they got there. It was only radicals and prophets who appealed to a new holism - understanding the whole person in the whole society; respected figures with the temple of medical science, including Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965) and René Dubos (1901-82), author of Mirage of Health (1959), were emphatic that the mechanical model of the body and the sticking plaster formula would at best palliate disease (too little, too late) but never produce true health." p.634.

Roy Porter, The greatest benefit to mankind: a medical history of humanity from antiquity to the present, London, HarperCollins, 1997.

INDIVIDUAL

|

     INTERPERSONAL    :     SCIENCES               

HUMANISTIC --------------------------------------  MECHANISTIC      

SOCIOLOGY  :   POLITICAL 

|

GROUP

"The psychiatrization of everything occurred first in the United States. It was a trend deliciously mocked in some of Stephen Sondheim's lyrics to West Side Story (1956), in which the crazy mixed-up New Yorkers taunt the police officer on the warpath: Officer Krupke, you're really square; This boy don't need a judge, he needs an analyst's care! It's just his neurosis that oughta be curbed, He's psychologic'ly disturbed. We're disturbed, we're disturbed, we're the most disturbed, Like we're psychologic'ly disturbed. " p.519.

frontispiece

Socio-Economic Determinants of Health Social Justice History Culture

Police 'the Law' Mental Health Act Political determinants of Health

Image - frontispiece in Porter's book "Renaissance anatomical illustrations often followed artistic conventions (situating the skeleton in a lifelike pose in a landscape) and played wittily on the tensions between life and death. The contemplating of the skull prefigures Hamlet's later meditation. Line drawing, Valverde de Hambusco, Historia Historia de la composicion del cuerpo humano, Roma, 1556."

Image source:
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/work-of-art/lateral-view-of-male-skeleton