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Katharsis (Greek) is defined as purgation or purification (Oxford English Dictionary) and refers to the Greek chorus that employed music, dance, poetry, and song to purify the soul. The nocturnal acts of healing in the temples of Asclepius employed purification to heal the sick.
Andrzej Szczeklik is a distinguished Polish cardiologist, clinician, research scientist, and chairman of the Department of Medicine at Jagiellonian University, Krakow, founded in 1364. In an enlightening foreword, Czeslaw Milosz, the Lithuanian-born Nobel Laureate in Literature (1980), praised Szczeklik as a learned physician with profound knowledge of the humanities and with a sensitivity to the moral limits that constrain the biomedical sciences. The boundaries of scientific knowledge are fluid, but boundaries do exist beyond which there are worlds inaccessible to science--the worlds of individual values, art, and faith. Plato, through poetic metaphors, captured truths inaccessible to empiricist research.
Szczeklik's aim is to break down traditional boundaries. Medicine, he argues, is a skill derived from magic in which art and science are inseparably woven into a seamless humanistic, scientific, and cultural fabric that includes the biomedical and physical sciences, ancient mythic history especially Greek, music, morals, and ethics. Catharsis provides a unique picture of the eclectic but interrelated origins of the medical profession and the pivotal role it plays between life and death.
Major professions harbor fundamental features that reveal an inner core. In medicine, that feature is an encounter between two people--the patient and the doctor. The patient tells a story while the doctor listens. For the patient who does the telling, the story (case history) is of utmost importance. The doctor doing the listening is well aware that one day the roles may be reversed.
The doctor's conversation with the patient is an interview designed to gather information--information about illness--a process that has been referred to as anamnesis, a Platonic reference to the vital means of gaining knowledge. Before doctors consider what might be wrong, they listen to a story from the past, a story about which they must be genuinely curious so the patient feels that someone, maybe for the first time, is truly interested. The doctor must talk the same language as the patient, must enter the patient's world with its intimate hidden content. To diagnose illness,...