Indecipherable diseases or epidemics put medicine to the test and send it back to its earliest origins. The healing of diseases and anguish, in addition to its proto-scientific facet, had a wise, poetic and shamanic aspect. As Pedro Laín Entralgo points out in Word healing in classical antiquity (Antrophos, 2005):
“Faced with the afflicting fact of the disease, the Homeric man employed, industriously or faithfully, drugs, surgical interventions, dietary remedies, cathartic rites and words.”
A fundamental part of the comfort of the patient passed through those chosen words that sharpened the conscience, guided the reparative actions, rebuilt the spirit, fueled hope and helped to expel evil. In the IliadFor example, the plague that afflicted the Achaeans was only reversed when, after consulting a fortune teller, they compensated their injustice and excused themselves with the gods. For the rest, in the many battles and Homeric adventures the wounded were relieved both with medical and dietary prescriptions and with magic formulas, spells and pleasant sayings.
Even now, alongside laboratory tests, sophisticated medications and modern, state-of-the-art interventions, empathy and good doctor-patient communication play an important role in many treatments. For this reason, some doctors do not stop considering their discipline as an art.
In Catharsis. On the healing power of nature and art (Cliff, 2010), Andrzej Szczeklik it evokes the holistic and archaic dimension of medicine and compares it to many of the new developments. It is the analysis of an up-to-date medical professional, but also of a man with a keen sense of proportions and of the fragility of the human. Medicine, suggests the author, is far from being an exact science and although there are certainty and regularities in its practice, there are also numerous exceptions. That is why, despite the evolution of medical knowledge, sometimes diagnosing a disease has a lot of divination and more when it is an insidious and changing disease.
Thus, beyond recent exploits in discoveries and treatments, there is a wide territory of gray areas and the doctor’s response to many diseases is usually of pain and impotence. Faced with the arcanes of incurable diseases or devastating pests, there is little to do, perhaps to lessen the pain, go to sedate the patient, which limits onomatopoeic suffering, but does not change the prostration, vulnerability and almost certain extinction of the sick. As Szczeklik says:
“When behind the door lies a sick person to whom there is not much to offer, the hand instinctively retracts before turning the knob. However, there is always one thing: presence. Presence as a sign of simple human solidarity. Presence: the doctor’s last duty ”.
SVS | Ass
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