A Short History of American Medical Insurance
September 2018 • Volume 47, Number 9 • John Steele Gordon
John Steele Gordon
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on board the Crystal Symphony on July 25, 2018, during a Hillsdale College educational cruise to Hawaii.
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about modern medicine is just how very modern it is. More than 90 percent of the medicine being practiced today did not exist in 1950. Two centuries ago medicine was still an art, not a science at all. As recently as the 1920s, long after the birth of modern medicine, there was usually little the medical profession could do, once disease set in, other than alleviate some of the symptoms and let nature take its course. It was the patient’s immune system that cured him—or that didn’t.
It was only around 1930 that the power of the doctor to cure and ameliorate disease began to increase substantially, and that power has continued to grow nearly exponentially ever since. This new power to extend life, interacting with the deepest instinctual impulse of all living things—to stay alive—has had consequences that our society is only beginning to comprehend and address. Since ancient times, for example, doctors have fought death with all the power at their disposal and for as long as life remained. Today, the power to heal has become so mighty that we increasingly have the technical means to extend indefinitely the shadow, while often not the substance, of life. When doctors should cease their efforts and allow death to have its inevitable victory is an issue that will not soon be settled, but it cannot be much longer evaded.
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