...the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a "break" that ripples above some deadly disease? Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
Albert Einstein
In A General Theory of Magic, Marcel Mauss attempts to distinguish the concept of magic as a social phenomenon that encompasses certain aspects of science, technology and religion, all the while, maintaining a distinct social system with its own definable terms. Mauss elaborates on the work of Sir James Frazer who classifies magic as a form of "pre-science" originating in "primitive societies"(15). Magic, according to Frazer, is the simplest, purest form of human scientific thought. The evolution of human thought appears to have sprung from the creative nature of the human mind and the attribution of creative mysticism to the totality of the natural world. "Immediately [man] endowed his universe with mysterious powers, of the kind he once arrogated to himself" (Mauss 17). Religion perhaps precipitated from the inevitable fallibility of humans. Since humans could not create in nature what they could create in their minds, humans may have created a third party, essentially gods, as a reason for their fallibility. The most recent event in Frazer's proposed genealogy of human thought involves human use of causality as a tool to collect and organize a posteriori knowledge into a systematic and reproducible form - namely science. Mauss goes about his objective of producing a distinct definition of magic by examining many systems of magic, beyond sympathetic rites such as contiguity and similarity, and formulating his essential elements of magic, the magician, magical rites or actions, and magical representations. Mauss explains magic in terms of collective phenomena similar, in this aspect, to religion. Magic, however, may be distinguished from religion in that its rituals serve technical objectives rather than serve to symbolize worship of a sacred notion. Magic, in this regard, does not contain a notion of the sacred, but rather serves as means to a desired end. Magic may involve the use of gods, demons, and religious icons within its practice, however, there is usually a technical objective. Mauss points out this objective as being a key similarity between magic and science. The following will briefly attempt to illustrate how, using Mauss's classification of magic, one may view systems of western biomedicine as "magical" when viewed through the lens of a differing embodied metaphor of illness than that of one governed by biomedical rationality.
Mauss asserts that magic has representations or laws that are governed by syllogistic logic and may be viewed as variations on the mechanisms used to distinguish science, namely experimental causality or a posteriori knowledge. The example I have chosen to elucidate the similarities between magic and western medicine, as viewed by an individual embodying a differing metaphor of illness than is typical in western society, is the procedure of hemodialysis. I spend much of my working week at a dialysis center for patients of various cultural backgrounds. Recently, I came across an article that sought to shed light on the seemingly irrational beliefs that are commonly expressed by dialysis patients. I personally identified with the article and was reminded of the qualities of magic as defined by Mauss. In the article, "The Body's Insistence on Meaning: Metaphor as Presentation and Representation in Illness Experience," Laurence J. Kirmayer discusses how the different metaphors for illness may formulate how one interprets and experiences illness. He shows how understandings of the mechanisms of these metaphors may assist in the elimination, or at least significantly decrease, the existing tensions between Western biomedical rationality and the individuals own attempts to rationalize their illness within their own cultural, social and personal ideology. Kirmayer succinctly illustrates the experiences of the hemodialysis patient:
"The patient witnesses his blood leaving his body and traveling through plastic tubing into the hidden depths of the dialysis machine. The machine has nervous habits: it blinks and twitches--shifting registers, clicks, and beeps mark the progress of blood through the machine. Once processed--transformed by the machine--the blood returns to the patient to be contained and hidden inside the body once more" (Kirmayer 328).
An individual is essentially "machine bound" as they are dependent on the dialysis machine to rid their bodies of toxins that would otherwise be ridden by healthy kidney function. Many patients have confessed their general distrust in their medical care and yet it is obligatory that they remain "machine-bound" for approximately four hours out of their day, three times a week. Some patients distrust is not necessarily unfounded as many had acquired kidney failure as a result of too much medication (usually Lithium, a salt prescribed in the treatment of bipolar disorder). Kirmayer tells the story of a dialysis patient called Mr. Y. Mr. Y is anemic and refuses to have a blood transfusion based on his belief that the blood of other individuals contains genetic material and thus will distort his personality (325). Mr. Y's physician has difficulty in viewing Mr. Y's presumption as anything other than irrational as it does not follow accordance with his/her biomedical explanatory model of illness.
Mauss describes the objectives of magical acts as either an attempt to expedite or create the occurrence of specific phenomena or to carry the involved objects out of a potentially dangerous state (76). Magic may be called an art of changing. The physician, like the magician is attempting to change the course of action of a particular occurrence, or in this scenario, attempts to deter death. Like the magician, the physician is distinguished from his/her colleagues by the specific procedures s/he performs (74).
Mauss extensively depicts how magic contains aspects of both technology, science and religion and yet remains its own separate social category. The above example depicts how traits of magic are similar to traits in western biomedicine. These similarities, however, seem to dissipate if one looks further into the principles causality and the variation of this principle associated with magic. For instance, Mauss describes science as based on knowledge acquired through repeated experiments, or a posteriori knowledge, whereas magic, like religion is based on belief, or a priori knowledge. When perceived through the eyes of an individual who does not possess an embodied metaphor of illness that is governed by the assumption of the superiority of rationality, the various technologies of medicine are seemingly inseparable from the rites of
magic.
Link to full-text essay by Mark Twain
http://grammar.about.com/od/60essays/a/twowaysessay.htm
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