As I was doing research for my final research paper for this class, I began comparing different ideas of medicine to some of the ideas put forth in Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. My final research paper is on how gender roles during the High Middle Ages were defined by medieval conceptions of the body and medicine. Reading numerous essays and books (okay, just part of the books) about how crazy medieval doctors were is almost comical, but just like Diana Axelsen’s article about Dr. Sims’ gynecological experiments and Elaine Showalter’s essay about mental health in Victorian times, I have to try to put aside my conception of the biomedicine model to understand how people throughout history thought of medicine.
As we were discussing The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down last week, someone in class made the comment to the effect of “Well, these events actually took place about twenty years ago, so a lot of things have changed since then.” I would like to believe that statement and after a lot of pondering about that comment, I do believe it is true. The fact that mainstream television shows portray cross-cultural healing such as in Grey’s Anatomy’s show (about the Hmong woman having surgery after meeting with a shaman) shows that our society thinks about cultural sensitivity more than ever now. Just as it seems so easy to look back on doctors throughout history, whether they are mental health practitioners during Victorian times or Neil and Peggy during the 1980’s, and condemn them for practicing “bad medicine” or even harming their patients (which I believe that they actually did, particularly during Victorian times) we must recognize that we judge these medical practitioners through the lens of biomedicine and society in 2007.
As I do research for my paper, it is hard not to judge the medieval doctors and society in general, but I have to try to understand that they simply did not think in the same way that we do today, and that many of the concepts that we consider important, such as racial and gender equality, were not really thought of as important during many periods throughout history. It is my hope that medical practitioners and administrators could learn from history, in cases such as Lia Lee’s, and make simple changes such as retaining a translator (better still, cultural broker) and recognizing when and how medicine is not working efficiently, such as in Lia’s case (when it might have been helped through allowing her parents more of their traditional healing techniques mixed with modern medicine.) How will society judge our concepts of medicine twenty, fifty, or even one hundred years from now?
1 comment:
The issue you bring up about looking at the situations through a 2007 lens is something that I've struggled with as well during this class. As we read articles about earlier medicine in the United States, specifically Sims, I found it hard to imagine myself in that time period. In order to fully understand what motivated people to make the decisions that they did, one needs to be able to remove themselves from the views of today. That can be nearly impossible to do. Another related issue that I've struggled with is if we remove ourselves too much when we examine these historical events. This relates to another issue that you brought up in your post. It seems that a lot of times when people look back on things that happened in the past, they see very clearly why they were completely out of line and could never imagines something like that happening today. The thing is, it's not necessarily that we can't imagine it happening today as much as we don't want to. We've seen during this class that there are horrible things going on right now yet the majority of the population has no idea, and a lot of people would probably be happier not knowing.
Post a Comment