Doctors and Healers by Tobie Nathan Isabelle Stengers & Isabelle Stengers

Doctors and Healers by Tobie Nathan Isabelle Stengers & Isabelle Stengers

Author:Tobie Nathan,Isabelle Stengers & Isabelle Stengers
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509521852
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2018-06-30T00:00:00+00:00


The power of experimentation

And yet the point will probably be raised that Mesmer’s magnetic fluid never existed. The commissioners’ method certainly turned the magnetized subjects into reliable witnesses for this partial truth, even if they did not deny the therapeutic efficacy of Mesmer’s staging. Also, double-blind placebo trials, which take place on a regular basis wherever a chemical substance aspires to the status of medicine, reliably attribute this status to the substances which emerge triumphant, the ones which have proved that were gifted with a therapeutic power which cannot be reduced to a mere placebo effect. So wouldn’t experimentation, then as now, be the ‘Royal Way’ capable of transforming the materials we have at hand into reliable witnesses?

Quite often, distinctions among fields which relate to modern scientific rationality in one way or another tend to be underestimated. So one might cite the example of astronomy vanquishing astrology, or alchemy made a fool of by chemistry, in order to promote the idea of the same glorious future for all, or to announce that the half-light of situations where the difference between ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ is not clear-cut – is only of a transitory nature, and that all hesitation will evaporate once scientific progress builds up sturdy rational method in each field. From this perspective, the singularity of medical practice would well and truly be in the domain of the ‘not yet’.

The history of science does not have the power to condemn an attitude or a hope, but nor does it offer the slightest guarantee for this longed-for triumph of experimental rationality.

In fact, I even think it possible that the successes of modern medicine, remarkable as they are, are not headed in this direction and therefore confront medicine with a practical challenge. But in order to explain this clearly, I first need to distinguish the real challenge of experimentation (the one which creates reliable witnesses) from the inoffensive and generalist image it often has of a neutral practice, governed by objective observation and stripped of belief and bias so that it is limited to the establishment of general relations which should in principle give birth to a theory.

There is no doubt that when the commissioners tricked Deslon’s subjects, they put the power of experimental method into play. They didn’t limit themselves to observation; they actively staged the situation; they invented a manner of setting out the problem of the existence of the fluid such that any parasitical causalities were removed from the scene. Experimentation is an active, inventive practice, and above all selective.4 It presupposes, implies and makes real the possibility of staging a phenomenon, controlling it and purifying it in such a way that it becomes what it was not, a witness responding reliably to the experimenter’s questions. But this possibility, which experimentation brings about, has nothing to do with a method which can be generalized. Phenomena are not subjected to experimentation through the simple exercise of the power to impose questions and extort answers. The phenomenon must be able to satisfy the requirements of experimentation.



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