DISEASE AND MEDICAL SCIENCE

                          DISEASE AND MEDICAL SCIENCE

The views expressed here are those of Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950) who was a great India philosopher, political thinker, yoga expert, poet and spiritual reformer. He wrote a good deal that has found prominent place in Indian philosophy, literature and spiritual heritage. His thoughts on ‘Disease and Medical Science’ though penned long ago are both realistic and critical. They are neither ephemeral, nor eternal, yet they are really significant ever-fresh.

Disease, says Aurobindo, is needlessly prolonged and ends in death oftener than is inevitable, because the mind of the patient supports and dwells upon the disease of his body. The doctor aims a drug at a disease; sometimes it hits, sometimes misses. The misses are left out of account, the hits treasured up, reckoned and systematized into a science.

Aurobindo adds it is not the medicine that cures so much as the patient’s faith in the doctor and the medicine.  Both are a clumsy substitute for the natural faith in one’s on self-power which they have themselves destroyed.

Aurobindo suggests that we ought to use the divine health in us to cure and prevent diseases, but Galen and Hippocrates and their tribe have given us instead an armoury of drugs and a barbarous Latin hocus-pocus as our physical gospel. Medical science is well-meaning and its practitioners often benevolent and not seldom-self-sacrificing; but when did the well-meaning of the ignorant save them from harm-doing?

According to Aurobindo the spirit within us is the only all-efficient doctor and submission of the body to it the one true panacea.

However, he is not outright against medical science.  He looks at it with the spiritual eyes of a naturalist and claims that medicine alone cannot cure a diseased being who also needs the spirit within to accelerate and accomplish the healing process.

26^th JUNE 2020                                      G. R. KANWAL