FREE NEJM E-TOC    HOME   |   SUBSCRIBE   |   CURRENT ISSUE   |   PAST ISSUES   |   COLLECTIONS   |   Search Term  Advanced Search

Sign in | Get NEJM's E-Mail Table of Contents — Free | Subscribe

Previous Volume 337:1637 November 27, 1997 Number 22 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

	Full Text Purchase this article Add to Personal Archive Add to Citation Manager Notify a Friend E-mail When Cited

By Eric J. Cassell. 206 pp. New York, Oxford University Press, 1997. $23. ISBN 0-19-511323-3.

It is Eric J. Cassell's impassioned thesis that the patient — the person, sick or well — has been pushed to the margins of 20th-century medicine by a cardinal and emblematic error, "the belief that medicine involves the application of impersonal facts to an objective problem that can be seen separately from the person who has it." In this distorted view, he argues, diseases are categorical objects, not processes, and patients are simply containers of pathologic processes, their bodies a mechanism gone wrong. Reductionist and atomistic aspects of medical science have crowded out clinical empiricism and clinical judgment — the . . . [Full Text of this Article]

HOME  |  SUBSCRIBE  |  SEARCH  |  CURRENT ISSUE  |  PAST ISSUES  |  COLLECTIONS  |  PRIVACY  |  HELP  |  beta.nejm.org Comments and questions? Please contact us. The New England Journal of Medicine is owned, published, and copyrighted © 2008 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved.