Medicine and the humane society.

Humane Medicine

151 that IRBs are political rather than ethical creatures and safeguard the interests of researchers above patients. He makes suggestions for the reorganization of IRBs to make them more democratic. McNeill's arguments illustrate that Snow's analysis still holds true. His position is that IRBs, staffed mostly by medical workers, exist so that research can be approved. To a non-scientist, the bu...

The Humane Society of the United States

Francis Bacon (1561 1626) is the recognized philosopher of industrial science and Isaiah of the age of technocracy. It is on his ideas that the technocracy of today is largely founded, as well as the prevailing attitude toward nature as something to be improved upon for the betterment of society. Benjamin Farrington writes that Bacon "in challenging men to win power over nature in order to impr...

The road towards a more humane medicine.

A return to humane medicine: Osler's legacy.

Sir William Osler is celebrated today not only for his contributions to the advancement of medical education, but also for the humanism he brought to the practice of medicine. He was a doctor whose bedside skills and manners were emulated, and can legitimately be called an infectious diseases specialist. Nonetheless, he was also a humanist in the broader sense of the term, a student of human af...

Mistaking the Map for the Territory: What Society Does With Medicine; Comment on “Medicalisation and Overdiagnosis: What Society Does to Medicine”

Van Dijk et al describe how society’s influence on medicine drives both medicalisation and overdiagnosis, and allege that a major political and ethical concern regarding our increasingly interpreting the world through a biomedical lens is that it serves to individualise and depoliticize social problems. I argue that for medicalisation to serve this purpose, it would have to exclude the possibil...