A Vivid Illustration of How Medicine Has Changed

[Rosalinda]

There is a movieclip at the Secondhand Smoke website on Wednesday, Sept.27 depicting a doctor played by Robert Mitchum fighting to save the life of an elderly patient. Today the heroic roles would be reversed.

The “do nothing” doctor would be depicted as the hero and the aggressive doctor denigrated as either religious or fanatic. The patient would have Alzheimer’s and the sympathy of the audience would be clearly directed on permitting death rather than saving life.

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[David_Paul]

Another era. The anti-hero is the hero today. Achievement is realizing life is worthless.

I suppose the culture will come back. They say these things run in cycles. I doubt I’ll be around to see it though.

 

[Rosalinda]

St. Thomas of Aquinas said, “A dead God is a contradiction in terms; to deny God life is to invoke death on all the universe, to move in a realm of shadows more ghastly than a world of the dead who still live.”

Many, while feigning to be believers, act for all intents and purposes as though God is dead.

 

[David_Paul]

St. Thomas of Aquinas said, “A dead God is a contradiction in terms; to deny God life is to invoke death on all the universe, to move in a realm of shadows more ghastly than a world of the dead who still live.”

Many, while feigning to be believers, act for all intents and purposes as though God is dead.

Relativism. A failure of reason which manifests itself in an inability to make moral judgements and to discern the order of creation. God is rational, we are rational being (albeit fallen);relativism is a corruption of reason and a denial of God. “Shadows” is exactly the correct term. So is Dante’s use of “shades” to described the damned.

I understood this two years ago when I was quite ill. Life threateningly ill. Spent most of three months asleep. The illness did not cause physical distress. Only sleep. But with that came dreams. . At first the dreams were amusing. Cartoonish in a Hieronymus Bosch sort of way. The dreams were never horrifying (because I knew I was dreaming and would awaken) but they did become an endless bore. I longed for order, for people in the dreams not to shape-shift, for eternal beauty, not chaos. The revelation which came from this was not mystical as I think of mystical. It was rational. I awoke one day and knew what I was seeing was Hell–a detachment from the Divine Order. While this may sound like a mild version of Hell, it was not. I knew being trapped in such a world forever is absolutely the worst thing that could ever befall a person.

 

[Holly3278]

It seems that medicine has gone from being for healing to sometimes for killing.