2023-05-19 00:54:47
Among the various disciplines into which we divide our knowledge, medicine is very special. It requires science and technology, but only with them would it not fulfill its proper function, a humanitarian anointing that places it in a privileged position in our interests and needs: that of caring for our health, preventing possible evils and trying to cure those that have already manifested themselves. Physics and chemistry help us to understand the universe, its contents and laws that govern it, geology explains the composition and dynamics of planet Earth, and the different technological branches make us transcend the few possibilities that the human body allows.
All of this is important, it makes us consider ourselves “little gods” (not without exaggeration, since there is much that we do not know and much that, surely, we will never know: for example, why the Universe exists), but medicine, the biomedical sciences, are closer and more important to us for our daily needs.
From such a perspective it is possible to understand some facts concerning the history of science. Such is the case of the Superconducting Super Collider (SCS), the gigantic particle accelerator that American high-energy physicists considered essential to continue developing the structure of the so-called standard model, and that it was going to be formed by a tunnel 84 kilometers long, inside which thousands of superconducting magnetic coils would guide two beams of protons that, after millions of turns, would reach an energy twenty times higher than that achieved in existing accelerators. . The cost of the project, whose design began to be debated in 1983, was initially estimated at 6,000 million dollars. After an eventful trajectory, and with the excavation of the tunnel already completed, on October 19, 1993, the United States Congress canceled the project.
The scientific medicine of the 19th century provided essential knowledge about the physical and chemical processes of the human body.
Had its construction been completed, the famous Higgs boson would most likely have been discovered there and not in 2012 at CERN’s LHC in Geneva. The main reasons that explain why the construction of this gigantic particle accelerator was not continued have to do with the end of the Cold War –in the end, as is being verified, a temporary end–, a confrontation that demanded constant improvements in defense and attack technologies, technologies nourished to a large extent by that physics; and, on the other hand, with the appearance on the scene of the biomedical sciences, an enormously fertile scientific field and much closer to the public, which was undergoing extraordinary development. The great beneficiaries of such a paradigm shift in US science policy were the US National Institutes of Health.
Much of the reconstruction of the history of science is organized by emphasizing developments that took place in physics, chemistry, or mathematics: the Elements of Euclid, the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, lto new chemistry introduced by Lavoisier, the electromagnetism of Faraday and Maxwell, the evolution of Darwin’s species, the special and general theories of relativity or quantum physics are milestones in that history that are never forgotten.
Less frequent, however, is to highlight the scientific medicine that gave birth to the 19th century, a medicine that provided essential knowledge about physical and chemical processes – that is what it is about. physiology, which flourished then – of the human body, but also advances that combated pain and infections such as anesthesia, aseptic techniques (Lister), the microbial theory of disease (Pasteur and Koch) and modern vaccination (Jenner, Pasteur ). From this perspective, the 19th century represents a breaking point with a dark past for health. A break magnificently exposed in Ronald Gerste’s book, appropriately titled Heal the world. The golden age of medicine, 1840-1914 (Taurus, 2023).
Medicine is science, yes, but as I have already pointed out, it also requires technique. And this is manifested in current medicine in instruments, perhaps so abundant that they break one of the most necessary aspects of this discipline, the doctor-patient relationship. Another good book deals with one of these instruments: the art of the scalpel (Salamander, 2022). The scalpel, the “other hand” of the surgeon.
Especially those who are already more past than future sometimes tend to think that “yesterday” was better than the present, a belief that only they can treasure because only they knew those yesterdays. And yes, there were pasts that were better than today, such as those that concern pollution of our planetbiodiversity and climate, but beyond these sections, the passage of time tends to improve many things.
And the possibilities of healing from medicine is one of them. Even so, we know perfectly well that it is not all-powerful, that diseases of many different types or disabling senility. And along with the pain or emotional or identity dismemberment that this entails, comes the awareness of our finiteness, a consequence of the most inevitable of “diseases”, aging, and its conclusion, death, which it deals with, in its more general dimension, not limited to humans, another work, all deaths (Critic, 2023), by Ricard Solé.
A new book deals with one of the paths through which the disease travels, In the end, matters of life and death (Salamander 2023), by British neurosurgeon Henry Marsh. Before a prostate cancer invaded him, he was the doctor who in his previous books recalled and explained cases – certainly with great empathy – with which he had dealt.
Today he is the patient who cannot be fooled because he knows. “Now,” he writes, “when I think about how the uncertainty about my future and the proximity of death tormented me, how I lurched between hope and despairIt amazes me how little I reflected on the effect my words had on my patients.” Sincere recognition, but belated, which leads me once again to remember how necessary the doctor-patient relationship is. I know that time is short, that there are many patients to treat, that there are many machines where it is easy, and surely necessary, to delegate, but can a machine console?
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