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The Politics Of Alternative Medicine
As the late 19th century progressed, physiological research was turning ever more towards reductionism – that is, the explanation of pathological phenomena through “evermore subtle and invisible causes”. This disintegration of the body concept, however, made it difficult to show how the body functioned as an integrated whole.
The debate which ensued is best characterised by that of the cardiac beat – some believed that the heart cells had an intrinsic and independent property to contract, while others thought that the heart did not work independently, but as an intricately interconnected part of the “whole” of the body. Further strength was given to anti-reductionist thought by Alexis Carrell’s difficulties with transplantation in the 1920s - 30s. Often, the organs he transplanted would be rejected by the body - this would not occur if the body really was akin the reductionist’s machine-like concept in which parts could be easily replaced. Something was going on which reductionism was not explaining.
The 1930s were an uncertain time, both politically and medically, in Western Europe. There was no central authority showing whose medical ideas to believe in, and it would be a fair assessment to say that the medical profession was in chaos, especially in France. These social factors gave rise to doubt about current medical knowledge: thoughts that perhaps the lab can’t explain everything, and concerns that medicine was far more complicated than at first thought. The result was pragmatic holism – viewing the body “whole” as more than the sum of its parts, and focusing on medical practices that worked, without necessarily knowing how or why they did.
The idea of viewing the body as a whole was easily transferred onto political systems. Ideological holism borrowed aspects of medical holism, and allowed individuals to think about political problems in a similar holistic light.
Out of holism, though, there soon emerged a paradox. The practitioners of medical holism began increasingly to turn to the lab, the very place which they had initially attempted to abandon, in order to further reinforce their stance against reductionism. This reaffirmed the authority of the laboratory as the prime environment in which to understand medicine and disease.
Written by Richard Lewis