Quotes from The Greatest Benefit to Mankind – A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present by Roy Porter. II: Medicine is an enormous achievement, but what it will achieve practically for humanity, and what those who hold the power will allow it to do, remain open questions

‘The art has three factors, the disease, the patient, the physician,’ wrote Hippocrates. Even in Greek times opinions about medicine were mixed; the word pharmakos meant both remedy and poison – ‘kill’ and ‘cure’ were apparently indistinguishable. That double idea – death and the doctors riding together – has loomed large in history. Medicine is an enormous achievement, but what it will achieve practically for humanity, and what those who hold the power will allow it to do, remain open questions. The emergence of this high-tech scientific medicine may be a prime example of what William Blake denounced as ‘single vision’, the kind of myopia which (literally and metaphorically) comes from looking doggedly down a microscope. Single vision has its limitations in explaining the human condition; this is why Coleridge called doctors ‘shallow animals’, who ‘imagine that in the whole system of things there is nothing but Gut and Body’. Hence the ability of medicine to understand and counter…