Invulnerability and Medicine’s “Promise” of Immortality: Changing Images of the Human Body during the Growth of Medical Knowledge

Abstract

Historians in all likelihood would not easily reach a consensus if asked to locate temporally the transition to contemporary medicine, since various criteria could be selected in terms of which contemporary medicine (1900+) might be identified as having come into being (I am, of course, referring neither to “modern” nor to Oriental medicine). In order to avoid this debate, however interesting it may prove to be, and thereby to by-pass this certain challenge from medical historians, I simply confess my bias at the outset: the origin of contemporary medicine is typically and not inappropriately identified by the general public as having its origins in the discovery of new knowledge concerning the cellular and sub-cellular mechanisms that govern organic pathology, i.e., infection in the body, as well as even more recent knowledge of the appropriate use of particular instruments invented, developed, and refined for a wide variety of surgical and other technological interventions, which, it turns out, is virtually synonymous with the emergence of contemporary medical power — having passed through a very extended epoch of “medico-technical powerlessness” [“medisch-technische onmacht”] (Dutch [17], p.2).