The Body of Descartes and Humanism in Medicine

Abstract

The patient-centred new medicine perspective revokes the humanistic era, in which anthropocentrism was strengthened in all the human fields, from the socioeconomic one to the artistic and philosophic one too. In accordance with this point of view, the conceptual basis of the humanistic medicine is that the patient is a person and not only a bearer of disease, and that, in addition to caring for the disease, it is likewise important to cure the person. The question is how humanistic medicine dialogues with the scientific medicine based on a reductionistic mechanistic and objective approach. This is more relevant in the context of chronic degenerative diseases, in which the disease becomes part of the life of the person and therefore influencing ones past significantly. The two authors of this chapter are a physician and a philosopher. This is pertinent with the goal of this chapter which will attempt to create a dialogue between the two faces of medicine, the scientific one focused on how to cure the disease and the humanistic one focused on caring for the person. In this chapter, the meaning of humanism is reprocessed, in the sense that humanism in medicine does not consider man as a dominant subject, and therefore strong, but as a subject disabled in his psychophysiological functions that must look for a new balance. The key words of this process will be the ability to adapt, resilience, homeostasis, but also empathy and listening.