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EARLY GREEK DOCTORS INSISTED THAT THE CAUSES OF DISEASE NOT BE ATTRIBUTED TO DISPLEASED AND VENGEFUL GODS |
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A year ago, a special issue of TIME highlighted some of the
biomedical advances of the late 20th century. This 1997 issue
celebrates men and women who have contributed to those advances.
Not all of the assemblage of healers presented here are doctors.
Nurses, technical personnel and seekers of botanical remedies
have also found the limelight. So has one committed American
woman who donated her bone marrow to a desperately sick person
whom she had never met. When she was asked what moved her to
come forward, and how she could tolerate the weeks of soreness
and fatigue that follow the marrow harvesting, her reply was
unassuming. She did it, she says, because "there's no choice.
You're talking about saving somebody's life."
Though she is not a healer by profession, the altruistic donor is imbued with the same stimulus, the same motivation, that has driven medical pioneers throughout history. The force that leads men and women to devote their lives to those who need help is their simple realization that, for them personally, there is no choice. More than a career, this has been their calling. No matter what other goals it may achieve, the medical profession has always maintained as its ultimate mission the relief of human suffering. Though the greatest of medical innovators have made their most important contributions for any combination of personal and professional reasons, the background against which their motivations play has never changed. It remains what it has been since earliest times: the constant mindfulness that individual people are enduring the effects of disease and that only through the intervention of others can their problems be addressed.
| 2,397 Years of Progress | |