Journal of Traditional Medicine & Applications(JTMA)

Former Clinical Director, Borra College of Health Sciences, Dominican University, River Forest, IL, USA

Publications

• Review Article   
  The Faustian Clinic:Mastery, Suffering, and the Bargains Physicians Make
  Author(s): Julian Ungar-Sargon*
  
  Goethe's Faust is usually read as a drama of knowledge, desire, transgression and redemption. It is also, and not incidentally, a drama about a physician. Faust has studied medicine along with philosophy, law and theology; he and his father treated plague victims with a remedy that killed more than it cured; and his despair begins not in appetite but in the discovery that accumulated knowledge has failed to yield wisdom or presence. His response is escalation rather than renunciation, and the wager he strikes with Mephistopheles is, precisely, a wager never to linger never to say to any moment, stay. This essay argues that the same wager is struck, quietly and repeatedly, by contemporary physicians, first with technique and then with the institutions that house it. Medicine rightly seeks knowledge, cure, prediction and control. It becomes Faustian when these instrumental goods har.. Read More»
  

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