• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

How can we affect national policy - or even make intelligent decisions in our own lives - if we don’t grasp the underlying issues? As I write, Congress is dissolving its own Office of Technology Assessment - the only organization specifically tasked to provide advice to the House and Senate on science and technology. Its competence and integrity over the years have been exemplary. Of the 535 members of the US Congress, rarely in the twentieth century have as many as one per cent had any significant background in science. The last scientifically literate President may have been Thomas Jefferson.*

[* Although claims can be made for Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter. Britain had such a Prime Minister in Margaret Thatcher. Her early studies in chemistry, in part under the tutelage of Nobel laureate Dorothy Hodgkin, were key to the UK’s strong and successful advocacy that ozone-depleting CFCs be banned worldwide.]

So how do Americans decide these matters? How do they instruct their representatives? Who in fact makes these decisions, and on what basis?

Hippocrates of Cos is the father of medicine. He is still remembered 2,500 years later for the Hippocratic Oath (a modified form of which is still here and there taken by medical students upon their graduation). But he is chiefly celebrated because of his efforts to bring medicine out of the pall of superstition and into the light of science. In a typical passage Hippocrates wrote: ‘Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things.’ Instead of acknowledging that in many areas we are ignorant, we have tended to say things like the Universe is permeated with the ineffable. A God of the Gaps is assigned responsibility for what we do not yet understand. As knowledge of medicine improved since the fourth century BC, there was more and more that we understood and less and less that had to be attributed to divine intervention - either in the causes or in the treatment of disease. Deaths in childbirth and infant mortality have decreased, lifetimes have lengthened, and medicine has improved the quality of life for billions of us all over the planet.

In the diagnosis of disease, Hippocrates introduced elements of the scientific method. He urged careful and meticulous observation: ‘Leave nothing to chance. Overlook nothing. Combine contradictory observations. Allow yourself enough time.’ Before the invention of the thermometer, he charted the temperature curves of many diseases. He recommended that physicians be able to tell, from present symptoms alone, the probable past and future course of each illness. He stressed honesty. He was willing to admit the limitations of the physician’s knowledge. He betrayed no embarrassment in confiding to poster-ity that more than half his patients were killed by the diseases he was treating. His options of course were limited; the drugs available to him were chiefly laxatives, emetics and narcotics. Surgery was performed, and cauterization. Considerable further advances were made in classical times through to the fall of Rome.

While medicine in the Islamic world flourished, what followed in Europe was truly a dark age. Much knowledge of anatomy and surgery was lost. Reliance on prayer and miraculous healing abounded. Secular physicians became extinct. Chants, potions, horoscopes and amulets were widely used. Dissections of cadavers were restricted or outlawed, so those who practised medicine were prevented from acquiring first-hand knowledge of the human body. Medical research came to a standstill.

It was very like what the historian Edward Gibbon described for the entire Eastern Empire, whose capital was Constantinople:

In the revolution of ten centuries, not a single discovery was made to exalt the dignity or promote the happiness of mankind. Not a single idea had been added to the speculative