Politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale

A few years back at an ADA meeting in Napa I got to listen to a dermatologist who understood how to influence government. I had never heard anybody speak live who was so effective, so effortless in his command of his brief, and with such charm. Maybe JFK might have had this effect, too. The there was Obama.

I do not have these skills, but more worryingly I do not think UK medicine does them that well either. I do not mean the ‘honours’ business, but meaningful attempts to balance the power and corruption of the state. We don’t seem to do activism well, either.

Some advice from last week’s NEJM, worth a read: ‘Effective Legislative Advocacy — Lessons from Successful Medical Trainee Campaigns’. Which, if nothing else, forced me to chase up the quote I (and others) have been misquoting for years from Rudolf Virchow.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Midweek programme on 22 February 2006, Jonathon Kaplan quoted Virchow as saying that, “pathology is politics writ large”. He seems to have been misquoting the usual part‐quotation that, “Medicine is a social science and politics is nothing but medicine writ large”. In fact, what Virchow really said was that, “Medicine is a social science and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale. Medicine as a social science, as the science of human beings, has the obligation to point out problems and to attempt their theoretical solution; the politician, the practical anthropologist, must find the means for their actual solution”

Link here to J Epidemiol Community Health. 2006 Aug; 60(8): 671.