Abstract

Past ages of medical care are condemned in modern philosophical and medical literature as being too paternalistic. The normal account of good medicine in the past was, indeed, paternalistic in an offensive way to modern persons. Imagine a Jean Paul Sartre going to the doctor and being treated without his consent or even his knowledge of what will transpire during treatment! From Hippocratic times until shortly after World War II, medicine operated in a closed, clubby manner. The knowledge learned in medicine was not shared with the patients, who were in general poorly educated and for the most part completely ignorant of the craft of medicine and the physicians (but not, perhaps, of folk medicine). Physicians were cautioned against telling patients too much about their Illness and/or their recovery, perhaps because physicians themselves did not have an enormous armamentarium to confront disease.