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

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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]

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