Affecting the Body and Transforming Desire: The Treatment of Suffering as the End of Medicine

摘要

The Hippocratic Oath formulates the ethical principle of medical beneficence and its negative formulation non-maleficence. It relates medical ethics to the traditional end of medicine, that is, to heal, or to make whole. First and foremost, the duty of the physician is to heal, and if this is not possible at least not to harm. This ethical principle helped to establish the necessary trust between physician and patient in the pre-modern era when most of medicine was nothing more than a set of placebos (Shapiro 1960). Beginning in the seventeenth-century, Western biomedicine finally succeeded in developing a modern critical science through its foundations in scientific induction and anatomopathologic correlation (King 1970, 1976, 1978). However, one consequence of modern medicine's success in diagnosing and treating acute illness has been the shift away from healing to curing as the end of medicine.