On values, professionalism and nosology: An essay with late commentary on essays by DeVito and Rudnick

The Pythagoreans defined all bodily appetites as propensities of the soul, as craving for the presence or absence of certain things. Most of these app etites they considered as acquired or created by men themselves, and theref ore they thought human desires were to be watched closely and scrutinized s everely... To overload oneself with superfluous food and drink was regarded as an acquired inclination of the soul. [T]he physician... must see to it that the soul of the sick, through a wrong diet, does not fall into 'idle, irreverent, harmful, and licentious passions' (Edelstein, 1967, pp. 23, 2.5 ). Another forum member said... to him both talks [on the genome project and o n outcome studies], 'reflected an expanding definition of what health is... what the future predictive disease states will be as well as the current f unctional status defined as health... (Iglehart, 1998, p. 1246). The controversy [in the 1960s about in vitro fertilization] owed more to a changing culture than to a changing science. In the late 1940s, Americans w ere still reveling in their wartime technological feats; advances in scienc e and technology, they believed, could only make their lives better. Then t oo, pronatalism amounted to a national religion and the public was disposed to view any new development that would enable the infertile couple to conc eive as;a social good. By the end of the 1960s, however, mistrust of scienc e, medicine and technology had become more prevalent (Marsh and Ronner, 199 6, p. 230).