Today, Teacher Wang spoke about many aspects centered on the question “What is medicine?”, with the emphasis on reflecting on the contemporary situation of medicine under the influence of modern science and technology. How medicine is defined is bound up with what role it plays in contemporary society.
Is medicine a science? Or is it a technology? Or should one say that medicine is a combination of science and technology? These definitions are probably all inadequate. Medicine is not something that can be defined simply by the concepts of science, or science + technology—especially since science and technology in the modern sense of “big science” and “high technology” are very far from the aims of medicine.
Science pursues truth and demands objectivity and universality; technology pursues efficiency and practicality. But medicine’s proper calling is care and healing. So, both historically and logically speaking, medicine does not belong to, nor should it be subsumed under, the category of science or technology; it is instead another independent tradition.
The scientization of medicine has caused a “crisis of objectivism”: the patient does not need to speak, only to go under the machine for examination and then pay. Medicine attends only to “observation” and does not care about “experience.” Illness, as “suffering,” has lost its modality and become merely an indicator on a report slip. And the logic of technology neutralizes the value of humaneness: within “healing,” the meaning of “care” is no longer contained; the object of treatment is no longer the patient, but only the “disease.” Medicine’s goal is merely to eliminate symptoms (to lower abnormal indicators) and to maintain life (to increase the time of survival). In the ability to keep dying lives limping on, modern science and technology show off their great power in medicine. But this dignity of technology cannot enhance the dignity of life.
On the one hand, contemporary scientism and the idea of technological rationality dominate the development of medicine; on the other hand, the role of medicine itself may in turn be affecting people’s values and attitudes toward life. For example, ancient people regarded “dying in one’s bed after a full life” as the perfect curtain call of a life well lived, whereas modern medicine—especially Chinese modern medicine, with no church next door—has almost deprived people of the right to die that way. Most people, especially those who held high positions and great power while alive, if they do not die in an accident, die of “illness for which treatment proved ineffective.” The meaning of life seems to be nothing but fighting disease, and in the end everyone is destined to be a loser; no matter how glorious one was in life, one must inevitably die as a loser, and many times one must first become a piece of wreckage barely kept alive by machines before one can meet death. What kind of attitude toward life is carried by “rescue” as a ritual?
To re-examine medicine is also to re-examine human nature.
November 5, 2010
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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