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When a doctor gets sick, his status changes. No longer is his role
de fined as deriving from doctus, i. e. , learned, but as from
patiens, the present participle of the deponent verb, patior, i. e.
, to suffer, with all the passive acceptance of pain the verb
implies. From pass us, the past participle, we get the word
passion, with its wide gamut of emotional allusions, ranging from
animal lust to the sufferings of martyrs. It is the connotation,
not the denotation, of the word that defines the change of status.
When a doctor is sick enough to be admitted to a hospital, he can
no longer write orders; orders are written about him, removing him
from control of his own situation. One recalls a sonnet from W. H.
Auden's sequence, The Quest, which closes with the lines: Unluckily
they were their situation: One should not give a poisoner medicine,
A conjuror fine apparatus, Nor a rifle to a melancholic bore. That
is a reasonable expression of twentieth-century skepticism and ra
tionalism. Almost all medical literature is written from the
doctor's point of view. Only a few medically trained writers-one
thinks of Chekhov's Ward Six-manage to incorporate the patient's
response to his situa tion. Patients' voices were not much in
evidence until well into the twentieth century, but an early
example is John Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624).
When a doctor gets sick, his status changes. No longer is his role
de fined as deriving from doctus, i. e. , learned, but as from
patiens, the present participle of the deponent verb, patior, i. e.
, to suffer, with all the passive acceptance of pain the verb
implies. From pass us, the past participle, we get the word
passion, with its wide gamut of emotional allusions, ranging from
animal lust to the sufferings of martyrs. It is the connotation,
not the denotation, of the word that defines the change of status.
When a doctor is sick enough to be admitted to a hospital, he can
no longer write orders; orders are written about him, removing him
from control of his own situation. One recalls a sonnet from W. H.
Auden's sequence, The Quest, which closes with the lines: Unluckily
they were their situation: One should not give a poisoner medicine,
A conjuror fine apparatus, Nor a rifle to a melancholic bore. That
is a reasonable expression of twentieth-century skepticism and ra
tionalism. Almost all medical literature is written from the
doctor's point of view. Only a few medically trained writers-one
thinks of Chekhov's Ward Six-manage to incorporate the patient's
response to his situa tion. Patients' voices were not much in
evidence until well into the twentieth century, but an early
example is John Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624).
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