The Rivers North of the Future by David Cayley

Author:David, Cayley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI022000
Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Published: 2005-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

8

HEALTH

My young friend Juanito, a baker’s son from a northern Mexican city, came here to show me his doctoral thesis and was very proud to point out his dedication, which stated that the work did not contain a single sentence which could not have been copied from one of my books, articles, or lectures. I was delighted. Then he asked, “Maestro, y que tu haces ahora?” And I said, “Me ocupo de salud.”1 Ah, he said, very interesting, you have returned to theology. I had meant health, but this misunderstanding is possible in Spanish, where the same word salud means both “health” and “salvation.” The context decides if I’m speaking of one or the other.

To this tiny interview, I owe my slowly ripened decision to make it known that I am not acting as a Catholic theologian. This is an institutional and juridically determined function within the Roman Church. And through lucky circumstances, nobody can tell me that I am a theologian. I am no theologian. I don’t want to act as such.

However I know also that I could not have analyzed medicine without bringing into this analysis my passionate attempt to understand a little bit of the Gospels, as well as my knowledge of the Church Fathers, and the great minds among the monks and churchmen who contributed to the 1,500 years of Western Latin culture. I’m sorry that my Greek isn’t good enough to give me direct access to Christianity’s Eastern tradition.

So I began to reflect on Juanito’s question. At the time, three things puzzled me deeply: the prolongation of life, the killing of pain, and the diagnosis of diseases. And in each case I was deeply surprised to discover that the words we use today could not have been used or understood by those who were called physicians in even the relatively recent past. It would have made no sense, for example, that there should be people around who prolong life, either by selecting only the probably long-lived foetuses for birth, or by fighting life-threatening elements in the environment, or by keeping people on drips to suffer for a few weeks or months more.

I found out that at around the same time that German philologists began to claim that education meant “to lead out into freedom,” the Hippocratic Oath was being redefined.2 Traditionally it had been understood to say that I, as a medical man, will have nothing to do with death, implying, I will neither procure it nor fight against it. Now it became, I will do everything I can to prolong the patient’s life. I became aware that throughout history in all cultures there had been people, from witches to masseurs to acupuncturists, who had tried to relieve pain, to make discomfort bearable, and to help and encourage people to face reality; but never had anyone spoken of killing pain until the middle of the nineteenth century, when, as I learned from an historical dictionary of Americanisms, various concoctions began to be sold in the United States under the name of painkillers.

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