This book was first published in 1974 by Viking Press. Dr. Thomas was known as the “poetphilosopher of medicine”, served as president of Memorial Sloane-Kettering Institution, and was distinguished by his ability to gather disparate thoughts and information together into unusually creative meanings. In this book Thomas discusses many things related to cellular biology, and among them writes a chapter about the practice of medicine.
He describes three overall “technologies” in the field. “First of all,” he writes, “there is ‘nontechnology”. It is what good doctors used to be engaged in at the bedside of patients with diphtheria, meningitis, poliomyelitis, lobar pneumonia, and all the rest of the infectious diseases that have since come under control.”
Second is the kind of treatment he calls “halfway technology.” Or treatments done “after the fact” like chemotherapy or organ transplants. Hugely expensive, it is celebrated at every “advance” by the media “… instead of the makeshift that it really is. … It is the kind of thing that one must continue to do until there is a genuine understanding of the mechanisms involved in [any] disease.” For example, chemotherapy aims to kill cancer cells that are already in one’s body. It does not cure or prevent cancer.
Third is the least expensive of the three: Immunizations and antibiotics that emerge from research by NIH, the National Institute of Health, and similar entities. Many horrific diseases like Smallpox, Influenza, Polio, Measles and Tuberculosis are either preventable or dispatched today because of our investment in research. The coronavirus took almost a million and a half American lives since it arrived here, but the speed with which researchers developed a vaccine for it is nothing short of miraculous. The reason they have had to develop additional “boosters” is because it mutates and thus keeps itself alive.
Now the NIH and CDC (Center for Disease Control) have, under Mr. Trump, been “gutted”, not only of funds, but also of many expert staff.
I was born in 1942; my brother, just over a year older, contracted polio in 1943. He spent that year in a hospital and returned to our family with no muscles in his upper arms. Until the Salk vaccine, people were transfixed by fear that they or their children would catch Polio. When Dr. Salk produced the vaccine (April 1955) there was universal acceptance, nay demand, to take it. People, even in the wake of WWII, knew how vital it was. My family was profoundly altered by Polio, and not in good ways. Perhaps we don’t acknowledge the toll of the Coronavirus because it hasn’t left visible scars. But anyone who must mourn a loved one who died or suffers debilitating conditions from it has my sympathy.
Whatever vaccines are available, take them. Be thankful for them and for all our antibiotics. These are very important defenses against infectious diseases that maim bodies and minds.