Sorry, I was distracted in our last discussion by scientists thinking that writing B.C.E. while using the same dating scheme for B.C. somehow makes them more objective, more secular, and less religious. What I really wanted to talk about was John Brock’s comment that “Hippocrates stands for the fundamental and primary importance of seeing clearly—that is of clinical observation.”* But it isn’t with respect to the healing arts that I mention this. Rather, it’s with regard to our current state of mind, our current behavior, and the prognosis of an insidious disease.
Hippocrates thought that maladies had their special courses to run. Given a particular disease to observe, one could see its prognosis. Ailments have predictable outcomes.
And so I wonder whether or not we have a predictable outcome for our current infection, the one that drove James Hodgkinson to shoot Republican Congressmen who were practicing baseball in 2017 and Cesar Sayoc to send bombs to Democrats in 2018. Sure, I know that this kind of violence has occurred in every culture and that political thinking breeds those who would assassinate their perceived enemies. To name a country that has not had some kind of political violence is to coin a name for a fictional tale. What has infected the brains of Hodgkinson and Sayoc has been an ailment as old as our biology? What made them take the extreme actions they took? Has the disease of political violence mutated into a more virulent strain?
Are the assassination attempts on American political figures in 2017 and 2018 symptoms of a disease? If they are, then what can be done to cure the disease? Hippocrates would say that every disease has a prognosis. A. J. Brock, translates one of the ancient physician’s primary questions: “What will be the natural course of the disease, if left to itself?”
Brock says, “Observation taught Hippocrates to place unbounded faith in the recuperative powers of the living organism—in what we sometimes call nowadays the vis medicatrix Naturae. His observation was that even with a very considerable ‘abnormality’ of environmental stress the organism, in the large majority of cases, manages eventually by its own inherent powers to adjust itself to the new conditions…And accordingly his treatment was mainly directed towards ‘giving Nature a chance’” (xi). Should we patiently “give Nature a chance” to heal the many patients afflicted with political violence syndrome? Are we in the midst of a new pandemic?
Do you think the malady of political violence, given the stresses of the current environment, can be healed? Hippocrates, as Brock writes, believed that “in pathology, it takes two (organism and environment) to make a disease.” Did both the organism and the environment produce Hodgkinson and Sayoc? Can there be a natural healing?
If one watches the current attitudinal and intellectual environment across much of the planet, one realizes that the disease of political violence isn’t localized, it’s not, for example, a “tropical disease” like Dengue fever, Ebola, African Trypanosomiasis, or Cysticercosis. No, we appear to be in a pandemic, one not yet as bad as world wars, but certainly one that threatens many individuals. Such a pandemic isn’t new. It has persisted intermittently through every civilization. And because of its persistence through the centuries and across all geographic borders, there appears to be no permanent cure, only some temporary abatement.
The question for us is whether or not there is a prognosis that ends in a cure. If we let Nature run its course, will the disease temporarily die out as the bodies pile up? As we run out of organisms to infect? Or do we look for some cure that makes the patients multiply, a cure based on the hypocrisy that it is always a disease that infects “the others”? We can’t be carriers, can we? After all, all that we do on “our side” is for the well-being of the species. “The others” are the carriers. And we know that one way to eliminate a disease is to eliminate the carriers or at least to isolate them.
Brock makes the following comment based on a quotation from Horace: “Political domination, the occupation of territory by armies, does not necessarily mean real conquest. Horace’s statement applied to medicine as to other branches of culture” (xiii). Does that apply today?
Do we hypocritically hold that the disease of political violence is a malady present only in those with whom we disagree? If so, then the prognosis is probably not good. Sure, there might be some temporary abatement in the intensity or spread of the disease, but it will, like every disease, mutate and recur. And if the natural course of the recurrence isn’t our destiny, then some will make it so: Consider those who today seek to manufacture biological weapons.
There are both willing and unwilling carriers of the disease of political violence. The environment persists, sometimes subtly and at other times overtly. Watch the news, read the papers, listen to the speeches. Talk to others. Be Hippocrates; be clinical. Take his advice. See clearly.
*Brock, Arthur John, M.D. Galen : On the Natural Faculties. London William Heinemann, 1916. p. xi.
Hippocrates thought that maladies had their special courses to run. Given a particular disease to observe, one could see its prognosis. Ailments have predictable outcomes.
And so I wonder whether or not we have a predictable outcome for our current infection, the one that drove James Hodgkinson to shoot Republican Congressmen who were practicing baseball in 2017 and Cesar Sayoc to send bombs to Democrats in 2018. Sure, I know that this kind of violence has occurred in every culture and that political thinking breeds those who would assassinate their perceived enemies. To name a country that has not had some kind of political violence is to coin a name for a fictional tale. What has infected the brains of Hodgkinson and Sayoc has been an ailment as old as our biology? What made them take the extreme actions they took? Has the disease of political violence mutated into a more virulent strain?
Are the assassination attempts on American political figures in 2017 and 2018 symptoms of a disease? If they are, then what can be done to cure the disease? Hippocrates would say that every disease has a prognosis. A. J. Brock, translates one of the ancient physician’s primary questions: “What will be the natural course of the disease, if left to itself?”
Brock says, “Observation taught Hippocrates to place unbounded faith in the recuperative powers of the living organism—in what we sometimes call nowadays the vis medicatrix Naturae. His observation was that even with a very considerable ‘abnormality’ of environmental stress the organism, in the large majority of cases, manages eventually by its own inherent powers to adjust itself to the new conditions…And accordingly his treatment was mainly directed towards ‘giving Nature a chance’” (xi). Should we patiently “give Nature a chance” to heal the many patients afflicted with political violence syndrome? Are we in the midst of a new pandemic?
Do you think the malady of political violence, given the stresses of the current environment, can be healed? Hippocrates, as Brock writes, believed that “in pathology, it takes two (organism and environment) to make a disease.” Did both the organism and the environment produce Hodgkinson and Sayoc? Can there be a natural healing?
If one watches the current attitudinal and intellectual environment across much of the planet, one realizes that the disease of political violence isn’t localized, it’s not, for example, a “tropical disease” like Dengue fever, Ebola, African Trypanosomiasis, or Cysticercosis. No, we appear to be in a pandemic, one not yet as bad as world wars, but certainly one that threatens many individuals. Such a pandemic isn’t new. It has persisted intermittently through every civilization. And because of its persistence through the centuries and across all geographic borders, there appears to be no permanent cure, only some temporary abatement.
The question for us is whether or not there is a prognosis that ends in a cure. If we let Nature run its course, will the disease temporarily die out as the bodies pile up? As we run out of organisms to infect? Or do we look for some cure that makes the patients multiply, a cure based on the hypocrisy that it is always a disease that infects “the others”? We can’t be carriers, can we? After all, all that we do on “our side” is for the well-being of the species. “The others” are the carriers. And we know that one way to eliminate a disease is to eliminate the carriers or at least to isolate them.
Brock makes the following comment based on a quotation from Horace: “Political domination, the occupation of territory by armies, does not necessarily mean real conquest. Horace’s statement applied to medicine as to other branches of culture” (xiii). Does that apply today?
Do we hypocritically hold that the disease of political violence is a malady present only in those with whom we disagree? If so, then the prognosis is probably not good. Sure, there might be some temporary abatement in the intensity or spread of the disease, but it will, like every disease, mutate and recur. And if the natural course of the recurrence isn’t our destiny, then some will make it so: Consider those who today seek to manufacture biological weapons.
There are both willing and unwilling carriers of the disease of political violence. The environment persists, sometimes subtly and at other times overtly. Watch the news, read the papers, listen to the speeches. Talk to others. Be Hippocrates; be clinical. Take his advice. See clearly.
*Brock, Arthur John, M.D. Galen : On the Natural Faculties. London William Heinemann, 1916. p. xi.
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