Vasyl Yakovych Danylevskyi's lecture on the doctor, the patient, and the successes of medicine (1921): annotated translation

Abstract

Unlike a mechanic, before a doctor there is a living person with all the manifestations of his rights and feelings, with a painful soul, with aggravated egoistic currents. The public easily forgives major failures and blunders of a quack but it will not forgive a doctor. The doctor's duty is to forget about his personal troubles for the sake of his weak patient and to instill in him cheerfulness, spiritual fortitude, and optimistic expectations. The patient must trust the doctor and respect him already in view of such self-denial for the sake of helping his neighbor. In functional nervous disorders, the doctor can limit himself to psychotherapy only. A family doctor disposes to greater respect and trust. A thorough knowledge of all medicine is absolutely necessary for any specialist doctor. A doctor is obliged to serve public health – to supervise schools, factories, markets, railways, etc. The successes of scientific medicine are not always familiar to the uncultured public due to their insufficient popularization by doctors. But over the past 50 years, scientific medicine and medical practice have made colossal progress: local and general anesthesia for operations has been developed, antisepsis and asepsis are carried out, organ transplant operations are performed, vaccinations against cholera and bubonic plague in humans have been introduced, a new science has been created – medical bacteriology, pathogenic microbes have been studied in many diseases, a successful fight against epidemic contagious diseases is carried out, diagnostic reactions to typhoid fever, syphilis, Pasteur institutes have been established; fluoroscopy is carried out; chemotherapy, salvarsan has been invented for the treatment of syphilis and relapsing fever; the therapeutic use of light rays and electrotherapy has begun; study of immunity, innate and acquired, anaphylaxis, study of immunity, innate and acquired, anaphylaxis, scientific psychiatry and psychotherapy is being developed, etc. Keywords: patient, social hygiene, superstition, scientific discoveries.