MEDICAL VISIONS FOR THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY
MEDICAL VISIONS FOR THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY
Cláudio Paciornik
December, 1996
In 1942, when the great discoveries occurred.
The Europeans – still under the Inquisition and recovering from the Black Plague which had decimated half of the population from Italy to Iceland, the great impulsive toward “western civilization” took place.
This was due not only to those most visible qualities, but primarily to what was later called the immune system.
These Europeans had already made their great Crusades. They had failed and were decimated in their attempts to establish themselves in the Orient and the Holy City. Upon entering into contact with the ancient peoples of the Indo, they fell prey to all sorts of maladies. Their empires in the Orient were short-lived. When, 500 years ago, they came to shore in the America, it was not their warrior´s spirit, nor their technology or knowledge that enabled them to conquer a group with a larger population, elaborate culture, efficient agriculture, astronomy and medicine. What enabled them to prevail was an immune system made up of acquired defenses, having coexisted with diverse illness; yet upon their encounter with these disarmed (indigenous) cultures, it provoked that which has been sung about in the heroic verses narrating military feats, and the sacred verses of catechism.
They traveled with seeds, plants and animals, and important exchanges took place. They found gold, “tears of the sun” for the local peoples, which they took back with them to their homelands. Following the witches and the unflinching martyrs, they burned down the forests of Iberia in order to melt down their metal. They engaged in commercial wars and provoked others. Africa was pillaged, since the slave trade proved to be the most lucrative of businesses.
If we look at the period of time that has transpired, we see the continued expansion of that civilization, based on the illusion of an infinite nature, or of something that is “just out there”, unlimited, eternal provider, raw material that can never be exhausted, considered perhaps as a mere given, and therefore, not considered at all.
The success that has created western civilization is based on a form of consciousness that does not perceive the finitude of life on this planet, that turns the living into things, or – for lack of consciousness – for its illnesses and resistance.
The endeavors for social change during this century, that aimed to set up bases for cooperation, also failed, sort-sighted as they were. Based on quantification, they ended up in disaster.
During the last 30 years, we have been slowly coming to the awareness that the so-called “primitives”, the vanquished, saw nature as their mother. They were one with her, with her spirits, animals and plants.
Reason and its objects are being laid bare, through the discovery of those astonished beings from the “dark basement of the unconscious” that determines daytime attitudes, from the function of myths, from dreams, from sin that is projected and reflected back, from those people that feel responsible for the path the sun takes every day across the sky.
At the same time, bombs that melt away megalopolis is exploded, wars bearing the names of cities are waged, in which children are slaughtered and women are strategically raped. Diseases are vanquished like conquered fortresses. And with ingenuous surprise, we witness the emergence of new ones, all the more complicated. The success and the contradictions of technology.
As soon as we come close to something, I run away from us, just like the lizard trying to catch its own tail.
Sores in the form of tumors appear, affecting more and more people at increasingly young ages. They are cut off, bombarded, poisoned; some disappear, others persist.
New discoveries, and suddenly, we are on the brink of a hypothetical year 2000, with an epidemic that completely annuls our much spoken of immune system, and for which we lack defenses.
We use the same arms, the same thought. We will destroy what attacks us.
What does this have to do with the crusades, 1500, and with us, when today we can communicate almost instantaneously with any part of the planet, and will soon be able to get even the most distant of lands in two hours’ time?
Upon discovering water on the moon, the rout to the greatest of trips and newest discoveries becomes a reality. The great leap of 1500 is made anew. The raw material is out there in space, waiting to be exploited.
The Columbuse’s, Cabral’s, and Isabel’s will all return. There are more creatures to be discovered.
Within this momentum, a pause, a recognition of the creature in its disorderly movement, puppet with two forces-consciousness, with its typical question: With its feats, expansions, technologies and catastrophes, that of the subject and object of conquest: Will we make it? With its dreams, myths and perfumes, one, only subject – Will we survive?
Two consciousness, apparently antagonistic, just like two serpents wrapping themselves around each other in a duel, one wanting to swallow the other. This image recalls the staff of Mercury, in which two forces ascend to a higher level where they become one. Winged flight.
This is the route we are traveling. Using technology that is under continual development, we will look at the intimacy of bodies and the world of forms, trying to resolve problems using less aggressive means. On one of the two sides, western medicine is being used for the person, seen in turn as a human subject, and not as an object to be treated for some alien disease. As an individual for whom everything lived is part of herself, or is himself. This leads to medicine which is based on this subject’s self-expression, and as the speech of nature, of education honoring the legacy of Aegean, of the knowledge that the “primitives” have handed down to us, opening up the route of the heart, the heart that illuminates the way we see.