OCULAR MANIFESTATIONS OF PSYCHOSOMATIC DISORDERS
- DAVID O. HARRINGTON, M.D.
Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text.
Excerpt
"Nearly half a millenium B. C., Socrates came back from army service to report to his Greek countrymen that in one respect the barbarian Thracians were in advance of Greek civilization: 'They knew that the body could not be cured without the mind. This,' he continued, 'is the reason why the cure of many diseases is unknown to the physicians of Hellas, because they are ignorant of the whole.' "
This quotation, the opening sentence in H. Flanders Dunbar's1 book "Emotions and Bodily Change" is, in effect, a brief of a new approach in modern medicine.
Thus the psychosomaticist frankly admits that his theories are centuries old and effectively forestalls the frequent criticism that the concept of psyche and soma as a unity has nothing new to offer the medical world.
The age of medical specialization was inevitable because, in the modern world, Socrates' "ignorance of the whole" was inevitable.
Footnotes
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Read before the Section on Ophthalmology and the Section on Nervous and Mental Diseases at the Ninety-Fifth Annual Session of the American Medical Association, San Francisco, July 5, 1946.
