The Surgeon Evgueni Vasilievich Pavlov in the Operating Theater, by Ilya Repin, 1888. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Medicine

Volume II, Number 4 | fall 2009

The Travelling Quack, by Tom Merry, 1889.

Preamble

The God in the Machine

By Lewis H. Lapham

Americans ask of medicine more than medicine can deliver—not only the cure for death, but also the gift of riches.

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The Doctor, by Friedrich Friedländer, 1870.

Great Expectations

By Noga Arikha

Medicine was once a humanistic endeavor, an art as well as a science. Today both doctors and patients fail to see that we are more than just our bodies.

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Map

Contagion

A brief history of malaria, leprosy, and smallpox.

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1610 | Toulouse

Preventative Care

Finding a cure for love.More

2650 BC | China

Yin and Yang

Achieving harmony in nature and the body.More

1554 | Montpellier

Body Snatchers

Bringing out the dead in medieval France.More

Charts & Graphs

Royal Treatment

The illnesses of heads of state.

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English art historian, novelist and journalist Iain Pears.

Founder of the Macrobiotic diet and philosophy George Ohsawa.

We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.

- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, 1969

Plato & Sigmund Freud

Lapham’sDaily

Fiume, c. 1890–1900.

Roundtable

A Poetic Regime

By Leopold Froehlich

The fascist aesthetics of Gabriele D’Annunzio. More

DÉjÀ Vu

Regulating the Sacrament

2017:

The Vatican forbids gluten-free communion.

1052:

Leavened or unleavened? Saint Peter Damian says he doesn’t care.

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LQ Podcast

# Michael Kazin

Lewis Lapham talks to Michael Kazin, author of War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918. More

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