health and medicine, continued

(In case you haven't picked up on it yet, I have embarked upon a long-form essay. It will continue.)So what is “medical” attention? It is well known but seldom seen as remarkable that most societies known to history and anthropology, even small scale ones with limited hierarchy and division of labor, have cultural roles for specialists in healing people. In societies large enough to support full-time specialists, as far as I know there is always a full-time healing profession. In some times and places these people have also been more generalist priests, with additional assigned powers, and priests can always try to get you some divine intercession, but usually there is a secular healer role as well, or more than one. There are some systems in which shamans can heal or sicken, curse your enemies, make it rain, make your object of desire fall for you, or whatever. There’s certainly variety. But in Europe and its metastasis to North America, since classical antiquity, physicians and priests have been distinct, as they are now generally around the globe.One reason I find this remarkable is that for most of history, almost everywhere in the world, these people couldn’t actually do much, if any, good, in most cases. They may have had some useful skills – to set broken bones, maybe to cut out or saw off rotting parts, perhaps out of their formulary of dozens or hundreds of concoctions a few were truly beneficial. But as we now know, most of what they did was at best useles...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Source Type: blogs