A FEW WORDS FROM THE LOST ART OF HEALING

No pleasure is quite akin to the joy of helping other human beings secure and lengthen their hold on life. (Pref. xx)

We ... turn to medicine to repair what essentially are tears in the social fabric wrought by violence, economic oppression, class ostracism, racism, sexism, and a host of other factors. In a consumer culture, in which nearly everything is treated as an article of consumption, medicalization is the response to mounting social frustration. Dissatisfactions with one's job, marriage, children, or with one's lot in life, are not uncommonly somaticized. (p. 317)

A patient can be driven to morbid despair, imagining the worst, after overhearing an inappropriate phrase or an ill-chosen word.

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Is it contagious?
February 17, 2003
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