Medicine
by
The Origin of Medical Terms suggests the word medicine is originally from the Latin medicina, implying the art of healing. The verb medeor may have more complex Indo-European roots, meaning “to think” or “to reflect” (Charyn 1951). In modern usage, medicine implies something more practical—both the pharmaceutical drugs used to treat disease and the profession of medicine itself. Indeed, this transition from a reflective meaning to an active one might be at the root of mainstream Western medicine’s often fraught relationship with the health humanities, a field that asks those whose professional identities are built on agentic “doing” to reflect, analyze, and consider in unfamiliar and often discomfiting ways (Boler 1999). Although the word medicine is often used interchangeably with health care as a whole, this conflation erases the particular and unique skills and contributions of nurses, nurse practitioners (NPs), physician’s assistants (PAs), social workers, respiratory therapists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, and other health-care professionals. Indeed, the history of the professionalization of medicine, through the formation of medical schools and professional organizations and the certification of trained physicians, is a history of exclusion. Moves to professionalize medicine in the mid-nineteenth century were as much to regulate ill-qualified and ill-trained practitioners...
This essay may be found on page 129 of the printed volume.