“The doctors are giving us damned little healing.

“And I am tired of the books they write to show us what fine fellows, what heroes, travelers, raconteurs, and connoisseurs of chablis they are. For my doctor, I want a connoisseur of feces. It is time and past time we writers undertook to compose treatises about the doctors. With them, as with the generals, it is not enough to be brave in the face of death; they must be bright, also, which is the rarer thing. Most of them are far from bright.

“I daresay you have not had as much opportunity as I to pry backstage in the medical fraternity. A man needs veins flushed with liquid helium for that adventure, because these fellows have a system for deceiving us and doing away with us under circumstances of great suffering that is enough to turn your hair white. If they are incompetents and know it, they are apt to roar and chortle at the discomfiture and death they have caused by whacking out the wrong organs and giving the wrong drugs. If they are able, they particularly treasure a host of gruesome stories about their inept associates, who, they will assure you with a shrug, have no more right to open up a human peritoneum than they have to undertake the government of India. But they never even think of stopping the meddlesome assassins.”

“Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.”

“In a world run by corporation executives, university presidents (‘football is central to the university’s mission’), congressmen, bankers, oilmen, and agency bureaucrats, people with the intelligence of an ant (a warm ant) might seem outlandishly intelligent. This is because the benighted self-interest of the self-appointed ruling class recognizes that objective reality is always a threat to their interests. If people, for example, realized that estrogen therapy and serotonin-active drugs and x-rays and nuclear power and atomic bomb tests were beneficial only to those whose wealth and power derive from them, the whole system would lose stability. Feigned stupidity becomes real stupidity.”

“Awe-inspiring medical technology has combined with egalitarian rhetoric ro create the impression that contemporary medicine is highly effective. Undoubtedly, during the last generation, a limited number of specific procedures have become extremely useful. But where they are not monopolized by professionals as tools of their trade, those which are applicable to widespread diseases are usually very inexpensive and require a minimum of personal skills, materials, and custodial services from hospitals. In contrast, most of today’s skyrocketing medical expenditures are destined for the kind of diagnosis and treatment whose effectiveness at best is doubtful.”

Re: “skyrocketing medical expenditures.”

This was published in 1976, 41 years ago!

“The five great physicians of the world are breathing, sleeping, eating, exercise, and shitting.”