Text 1A5-l

There are many ways in which medicine and culture combine to shape our values and traditions. Medicine and culture are, in fact, inseparable entities and together make up a complex world, or set of worlds. Medicine itself is a culture and a world of its own, with institutions and subinstitutions peculiar to it, and with rites of passage, forms of education, standards of behavior, and sets of norms that have their own history and development and semiautonomous life — as anyone who has ever been hospitalized will immediately recognize. At the same time, however, medicine is an integral and indispensable part of larger social cultures as well — the culture of science, of religious and ethical beliefs, and of our changing society, with its own evolving values and attitudes.

From Grego-Roman times to the present, medicine has been a vital source of authority in Westem societies. One cannot understand such massive and diverse cultural shifts in Westem civilization as the decline of magic, the preoccupation with cleanliness, or the appreciation of the unconscious without recognizing medicine's extraordinary ability to intervene in — indeed, to shape — culture. Over time, medicine has acquired the power to demarcate the line between the normal and the abnormal, the biologically innate and the culturally determined, between male and female, life and death. In a more intimate sense, medicine affects what people will — or will not — eat, drink, touch, or embrace.

David J. Rothman, S. Marcus and S. A. Kiceluk. Medicine and western civilization. New Brunswick (NJ): Rutgers University Press, 2000, p. 1 (adapted).

With the comment “as anyone who has ever been hospitalized will recognize” (third sentence of the first paragraph), the authors of the text 1A5-I mean to stress the idea that