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Paolo Grieco

Talk about diseases means approaching a completely different world, the world of suffering and pain, 'a monsters attacking our body'. The ill person gets far from the daily reality, he does not look at it as usual when he is wealthy. His cognitive processes and the affection world undergo changes.
But till which point is the physician able to understand disease, its origin, and the several degrees along which it develops? “For the ill person, - writes Byron J. Good in “Narrating the disease.
An anthropological watch to the physician/patient relationship“ - as well as surely for the physician, the disease is lived as it is present on the body, but for whom suffers the body is not only a mere physical object or a physiological condition: it's an essential part of the self. The body is a subject, the ground itself of subjectivity and of the experience of world “.
Anthropology teacher at the prestigious Harvard Medical School and deemed as one of the best researchers in this field, Good underlines how physicians trend to neglect, while imposing their acknowledgements, a series of psychological aspects essential to understand disease.
“A cancer - he says - is clearly a material form...a big mass, an histological alteration conceived in order to cell proliferation processes... It's a physiological condition, the result of a ruling genetic scheme 'activating' certain growth forms. But it's also much more. It belongs to a living a sensible body, it's a dramatic break within an existential story “.

So which are the criteria that must guide the physician in individuating the disease? The researches carried out by the author in countries as Iran and Turkey, having a different tradition and medical culture, bring him to deem the disease as a sort of 'esthetical object'. The masterwork of art can be for example a painting, a material object, provoking feelings and emotions in those who look at it, feelings and emotions different from the canvas or the paint in oils.
The same occurs for a disease. On a side there's the ill body, the object, on the other side the presence of disease in the life of the person. So it is required to get closer to a cultural anthropology perspective, that means trying to understand the cultural aspects of the disease, formed also by the social, religious and human history of disease.
By this point of view they are especially interesting the anthropological interviews to patients treated with humoral medical systems, featuring the eastern and Islamic medicine current as we said in Iran and Turkey.
It concerns treatment methodologies that in the west are often deemed as popular beliefs and superstition, but that instead put in light other aspects of suffering and pain, to state the subjective data, to understand how it is not possible to have a sight 'reductively biological' of human life. "On the other side - annotates Good - the debate about abortion does not deal with the presence of spirit or soul in the fetus, or further more the nature of personality, but confine itself to a politicized engagement toward life. The infant mortality rate is deemed the only criteria of success of the international health programs. And the United States spend a remarkable amount of the health budget for last weeks of life, such is our engagement and our technological potentiality to prolong the life duration“.
An utmost interesting analysis that of Good. It puts in light that we could define the 'pride' of modern medicine, too proud of the results it has achieved. Already in a well-known essay of some years ago, a sociologist as Norbert Elias talked about “The loneliness of the dying person", and unavoidable loneliness in a society trending to remove the idea of death. Good makes us realize how much disease is still hard to understand, how it is something hidden, secret, that cannot - we want to add - be separated from the mystery itself of our life.
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