"Coronavirus" is the latest manifestation of our "Medical Nemesis"
*Within the last decade medical professional practice has become a major threat to health. Depression, infection, disability, dysfunction, and other specific "iatrogenic" (caused by doctors) diseases now cause more suffering than all accidents from traffic or industry. Beyond this, medical practice sponsors sickness by the reinforcement of a morbid society which breeds the therapist’s client in a cybernetic way. Finally, the so-called health-professions have an indirect sickening power—a structurally health-denying effect. I want to focus on this last syndrome, which I designate as Medical Nemesis.
By transforming pain, illness, and death from a personal challenge into a technical problem, medical practice expropriates the potential of people to deal with their human condition in an autonomous way and becomes the source of a new kind of un-health.
Much suffering has always been man-made: history is the record of enslavement and exploitation.
It tells of war, and of the pillage, famine, and pestilence which come in its wake.
War between commonwealths and classes has so far been the main planned agency of man-made misery.
Thus, man is the only animal whose evolution has been conditioned by adaptation on two fronts.
If he did not succumb to the elements, he had to cope with use and abuse by others of his kind.
He replaced instincts by character and culture, to be capable of this struggle on two frontiers.
A third frontier of possible doom has been recognized since Homer; but common mortals were considered immune to its threat.
Nemesis, the Greek name for the awe which loomed from this third direction, was the fate of a few heroes who had fallen prey to the envy of the gods.
The common man grew up and perished in a struggle with Nature and neighbor.
Only the elite would challenge the thresholds set by Nature for man.
Prometheus was not Everyman, but a deviant.
Driven by Pleonexia, or radical greed, he trespassed the boundaries of the human condition.
In hubris or measureless presumption, he brought fire from heaven, and thereby brought Nemesis on himself.
He was put into irons on a Caucasian rock.
A vulture preys at his innards, and heartlessly healing gods keep him alive by regrafting his liver each night.
The encounter with Nemesis made the classical hero an immortal reminder of inescapable cosmic retaliation.
He becomes a subject for epic tragedy, but certainly not a model for everyday aspiration.
Now Nemesis has become endemic; it is the backlash of progress.
Paradoxically, it has spread as far and as wide as the franchise, schooling, mechanical acceleration, and medical care.
Everyman has fallen prey to the envy of the gods.
If the species is to survive it can do so only by learning to cope with this third threat [blind hubris of the elite].
That society which can reduce professional intervention to the minimum will provide the best conditions for health.
The greater the potential for autonomous adaptation to self and to others and to the environment, the less management of adaptation will be needed or tolerated.
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In summary, our inalienable right to provide or reject what goes into our bodies is God given and should never be relinquished to the State.
*This article was originally published in the Lancet in 1974 by Ivan Illich
http://m.jech.bmj.com/content/57/12/919.full
based on his book "Medical Nemesis"
https://ratical.org/ratville/AoS/MedicalNemesis.pdf