In my last post, I talked about the philosophy and teachings of the Greek physician Hippocrates, the man considered to be the father of Western healing.
Hippocrates advocated nature’s ability to heal illness and restore proper health to an individual. Across the world, eastern cultures also believed there is a natural healing source flowing within us. This healing source integrates with our human bodies and provides the energy that affects the material elements, tissues, and systems that our bodies are made of.
Hippocratic medicine was the basis of treatment for many centuries in Europe. The objective was to empower the individual with the means to inspire and facilitate healing, and Hippocrates had instituted a rational method for the practice of medicine.
With the emergence of the Italian Renaissance in the seventeenth century, scientists demanded a more rigid definition of what “rational” was going to mean. They argued that human senses could no longer be trusted and that medical facts must be measured through a complex and stringent system of criteria, a set of rules that must be proven and verifiable. This negated the idea that a person’s health was contingent upon “inner balance” – a concept difficult to quantify – and the premise that attitude and emotions may be involved in the healing process, concepts deemed “unprovable” at the time.
With the science of modern anatomy, physiologists rationalized that the systems of the body were mechanistic and could be taken apart for analysis. They maintained that the human body is a magnificent machine, a series of parts that operate together like a finely tuned engine. They observed how the individual parts operated and discovered that food and oxygen mixed together in the blood to become the fuel that powered the figure. The new model of the human body was understandable, predictable and unfettered by whims of fancy, certainly not connected to the most unpredictable element in humankind, the mind.
“Nature can do more than physicians.”
— Oliver Cromwell
This new model of science flew in the face of the great power in Europe, the Holy Roman Catholic Church. The church considered the human body to be a reflection of God, made in His image and off limits to scientific dissection and study. Scientists often found themselves under scrutiny by forces that were not amused by scientific revelations. For many years the atmosphere was dangerous and even fatal to those who dared to buck the power of Rome.
The problem was solved not by scientists or holy men, but by a popular and influential philosopher. Rene Descartes asserted that the human body and the human mind were sole and separate entities, mutually exclusive of each other. This notion divided a person into two halves; one part spirit, belonging to God and the church, and the other part material and subject to scientific exploration.
Descartes described the mind as spirit, a holy element of human existence, as the Greeks had alluded to centuries before. He understood the body to be a purely physical entity which could continue to operate “were there no mind in it at all.” Descartes maintained that the body was of the Earth and natural, while the mind was holy and transcendent, existing to hold dominion over the natural world.
These and other scientific ideas came to dominate the landscape of seventeenth century Europe, assisted in no small way by the work of Sir Isaac Newton. Newton postulated that the universe itself was a great machine, subject to rational laws and mechanical principles, and that humans are subject to the same laws as the great creation itself.
The themes were repeated over and over – the universe is a machine, and like it – the body is a machine, quantifiable through the study of its parts, independent of any mind that may govern it. This approach led to the science of reductionism, and from its inception a profusion of scientific exploration gave rise to what is now called the Age of Reason.
Like modern science, advances in medicine are remarkable and inspiring. We can now cure many infectious diseases and repair and resuscitate the broken bodies of accident victims; we can even keep people alive who cannot do so for themselves. With respirators, feeding tubes and intravenous devices we can keep a person’s vital signs operating beyond the point of natural death, tethering them to their bodies until some force heals them or the plugs are pulled and they are allowed to pass.
It’s all very awe inspiring and miraculous but more and more, something is woefully missing. It seems readily apparent to most of us that a person is more than the sum of his or her parts, and that a person’s thoughts, feelings and beliefs define who they are more accurately than their material body does.
Science has led us to the point where we can keep a person alive beyond any quality of life, an emotional concept subject to the opinions of the individual and experienced in his or her mind. Perhaps it’s time to take a larger view of the human condition and where we are headed.