Language and the Healing Arts

4b, Language and the Healing Arts Robert VV. Daly When a society is well ordered, healers assist its members—individually and collectively—to maintain and improve the organismic foundations of life and living. Healers know that "the word" can cure—or cause—disease, and they are traditionally concerned with the meaning of the medical literature and with its reference to health. When members of a society espouse more or less integrated moral and aesthetic values, poets sing of what life and living consist in, of what is admired or despised. Every reader of fiction, poetry, and plays knows that many guises of health, disorder, and treatment have been subjects of literature for millennia. In such a society, the differences between the aims and methods of healers and poets provide a basis for understanding and criticizing each and for apprehending the place of each in living well. But modern societies are not well ordered. They are disordered, pluralistic, even anomic. In personal relations; in politics; in the marketplace of goods, services, sentiments, and ideals; in consulting rooms and at bedsides, people are uncertain and perplexed. They feel that "the center does not hold" and that "whirl is in the saddle." The ideas and sentiments employed to resolve human dilemmas are in doubt or in dispute. In this milieu, people ask, what must be salvaged? reconstructed ? renewed? In recent decades, the spirit of reform in the Western democracies has been expressed in many domains. Two are central to the concerns of this journal: language and the healing arts. Language, the primary means of human communication, is essential to human existence. The times are too perilous to use language uncritically or to be simply content to enjoy conversation and literature for their own sakes. We need to study language, to experiment and play with it, in order to refine it for our purposes. Language—oral, written, electronic—has therefore become an object of study. Some linguists and grammarians, psychoanalysts (especially of the Parisian School), social scientists, and philosophers even subscribe to the idea that "a theory of signs can and must be prior to a theory of things."1 The influence of the Literature and Medicine 1 (Rev. ed., 1992) 42-43 © 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Robert W. Daly 43 permutations of this idea on the composition, writing, and analysis of contemporary literature must be acknowledged by the editors of this journal. Because health is also essential for life and for living well, people experience the religious, moral, political, and economic conflicts of our age in the domain of medicine. It is no longer enough that the patient complain and the healer provide a remedy. People must also understand what transpires. The activities of patients and healers, their cultures, organizations, and passions, have also become objects of study. As a result, the dramatis personne of medicine are becoming increasingly selfconscious . The editors of Literature and Medicine must also acknowledge these facts. Now to the point of these observations. So far (with the exception of some analytic philosophers and psychoanalysts), the scholars who have generated each of the aforementioned sets of inquiries have proceeded without reference to one another. Those scholars who have attempted to discern and to reorder the cultural foundations of medicine on the basis of social, legal, or philosophical investigations are largely unaware of the alterations in poetics inspired by modern studies of language. Those who have encouraged the recent developments in poetics know very little about the theory and practice—and, therefore, the languages—of modern medicine. The readers of Literature and Medicine are fated to discover the confluences and collisions of these two traditions of inquiry within the pages of this journal, for the editors inherit both the problems and the opportunities associated with the commingling of these two traditions of inquiry. It is hard to discover by looking ahead exactly what course the editors should steer in the light of these impending confluences and collisions. Perhaps something can be learned by watching the wake of this brave ship. In the meantime, I hope it will stay afloat and catch a fresh and favorable breeze. NOTE 1. Paul Ricoeur, Main Trends in Philosophy (New York: Holmes...