PERSPECTIVES IN BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE Volume 32 · Number 3 ¦ Spring 1989 MEDICINE IN THE FOCAL SPOT OF THE NATURAL SCIENCES, TECHNOLOGY, AND HUMANITY OLAV HILMAR IVERSEN* In 1845, 143 years ago, the great Norwegian poet Henrik Wergeland was admitted to the National Hospital to be treated for advanced consumption . He held an important position in the civil service and was given a single room and the best possible treatment—which to us now seems positively pathetic. After his ears had been rinsed out with tepid water, three to four drops of Goulard's extract were dripped into them, and then a hot flour-and-water poultice was laid on his chest. After 10 days of treatment, he was discharged as uncured; he died a few months later. The warm poultice may have relieved the pain a little; at any rate, he was inspired to write two great poems during his stay in hospital, "A Night in Hospital" and "To a Cheiranthus," addressed to the flower by his bedside. At that time consoling the sick was medicine's only real therapeutic contribution, and it was often a meager one at that. In this case one can almost say that it was Wergeland who consoled us, by his poetry. Since then there has been a medical revolution. Because of our increased insight into the natural sciences—chemistry, pharmacology, immunology , microbiology, epidemiology—tuberculosis is no longer a dangerous disease in the Western world. When I began studying medicine, exactly 100 years after Wergeland's death, we were taught that, as physicians, we would be able "occasionally to cure the patient, often to relieve his suffering, always to console him." This is a translation of a paper read at the Annual Feast, University of Oslo, September 1987. * Professor of pathology, Universitetet Oslo, Institutt for Patologi, Rikshospitalet, 0027 Oslo 1, Norway.© 1989 by The University of Chicago. AU rights reserved. 003 1-5982/89/3203-064310 1 .00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 32, 3 ¦ Spring 1989 | 315 The main emphasis was to provide relief of suffering and reassurance; the human aspect was the most important. In the 40-odd years since then, medical knowledge has increased at enormous speed, and in its giant strides forward has become more and more involved with the natural sciences and technology. Diagnosis and treatment are increasingly based on objective, scientifically proved facts and on technology. Today we can generalize that physicians "often cure, almost always relieve suffering, have almost no time for consolation." The average life span in Norway for the period 1846-1850 was 49 years for men and 51 for women. Today it is 73 years for men and 80 for women. Economic prosperity, better living standards, and preventive and curative medicine have given each ofus an average of 30 years more oflife, almost two-thirds ofthe entire life span in Wergeland's time. The kinds of diseases we suffer from have also changed. Acute infectious diseases are in practice no longer fatal and have been replaced as major medical concerns by the chronic diseases—heart disease, cancer, rheumatism, and so on. Nowadays the best guarantee oflong life is to be the nonswimming wife of a country priest. Statistically speaking, the ability to swim is a risk factor, since it often involves contact with deep water and small boats. It is, ofcourse, impossible in such a short article to describe in detail all the great discoveries that have contributed to modern medical science. I shall therefore restrict myself to an example from basic biology and one from technology and then touch briefly on the human factor. Each cell of the human body has a nucleus that contains a genetic code that is a blueprint of what the cell can and must do. When the cell divides, the genetic material, or DNA, contracts and forms 46 small rods, called chromosomes. Twenty-three ofthese come from the mother and 23 from the father. We now know that each cell contains all of the genetic information for the whole body but that only a fraction of this information is being used at any time in any one cell. In other words, the cell resembles a cook with a large...