Technocracy Rising
"You can call it surveillance if you want to; but we call it care and concern" (Jon Rappoport)
That tactic of the occult war that is currently being waged within the framework of a global bureaucratically-inspired necromantic experiment is not included among those that Guénon and Evola once identified. The level of complicity that is required at the heights, or rather at the depths, of power, whether in the economic, cultural, medi(c)a(l), or political sphere, for this experiment to be conducted effectively on a worldwide scale, while unsurprising for those outsiders who are “in the know” without the knowledge of ignorant insiders, is vertiginous.
By all appearances, a term which is also to be understood in its cinematographic sense here, it marks an abrupt acceleration in the preparatory smooth process of the crowning of pastoral – or, as I renamed it (see elementsdeducationraciale.wordpress.com/2019/10/28/le-pouvoir-panique-3/) - panic, power. Interestingly, Pandora, whom Hesiod mentions as the first woman, was the first head crowned by “the beautiful-haired Seasons” (see, for the original Greek text, sites.utexas.edu/scripts/files/2016/07/palaima_2012a.pdf, p. 700), after she received gifts from all the gods; interestingly, too, the Greek for “crown” is rendered as “Horen”, which I believe is a poetic form of “hörner” (“horns”) in the German translation of “The Work and the Days”, as horn-shaped spikes were what ancient crowns were made of (see elementsdeducationraciale.wordpress.com/2020/02/11/le-droit-et-la-revolution/, note 5 ;in Hebraic, “Keren” means both “horn” and “crown”), ornaments (see web.archive.org/web/20150403175309/http://www2.gwu.edu/~art/Temporary_SL/177/pdfs/Loos.pdf) which historically, before being worn by kings, were worn by priests. 
Never perhaps in history have the two main weapons that combined rhetoric benevolence (the carrot) and actual fear-mongering (the stick) are been used in so perfect a symbiosis, in so synchronised, symphonic a fashion.
It is evidenced and discussed in a rather penetrating manner and, any case, unsensationalistically at:
 www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbjQ1sC0ahk  (the slightly lyrical outburst at the very end of this podcast may be "forgiven", given the quality of previous considerations)  
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGwkXF3bNd0
www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqX3qZiZy9o
About so-called “viruses”, which may soon prove to be the ultimate arm of gynecocrato-globalist forces, please check “Viruses: Lethal Mini-Monsters?” (p. 40-9) at www.whale.to/c/Virus-Mania55tt66.pdf/; www.drrobertyoung.com/post/dismantling-the-viral-theory may also be, more than useful. vital in current circumstances. 
Evola As He Is
In the late XIXth century in Europe, hygienics was the product of the close relationship that was established between bureaucratic and medical milieux as a result of that reconfiguration of power into what Foucault referred to as “the apparatus of security”, that is, the (privately-owned) state machinery needed to ensure, through an endless variety of processes, procedures, techniques, rules, norms, etc., “the security of the population, and, consequently, of those who govern it” (quoted in Anders Esmark, The New Technocracy) (*). Emphasis is ours (**).
From the 1980’s onwards, the AIDS hoax contributed largely to strengthen this relationship (see, only about the bureaucratisation of medicine and the “medicalisation” of bureaucracy – as the subtitle of the book [“Why Society Failed to Meet the AIDS Crisis and How We Might Improve Our Response”) strongly suggests that it does not document this scientific fraud - Sandra Panem, The Aids Bureaucracy), a relationship which meanwhile has developed into a symbiotic interconnectedness (whose tip) we can see at work with our own eyes in the pandemic unfolding of the current choreography.
“Looking Backward 2000-1887” (1888) by Edward Bellamy has not been adapted to the screen. Maybe it does not need to. A best-seller for five decades, “(i)t was published a time when Americans were frightened by working class violence and disgusted by the conspicuous consumption of the privileged minority. Bitter strikes occurred as labor unions were just beginning to appear and large trusts dominated the nation’s economy. The author thus employs projections of the year 2000 to put 1887 society under scrutiny. Bellamy presents Americans with portraits of a desirable future and of their present day. He defines his perfect society as the antithesis of his current society. Looking Backward embodies his suspicion of free markets and his admiration for centralized planning and deliberate design.
“Looking Backward is a promotional argument and an attempt to informally educate the American public through the medium of the romantic novel. From this perspective, it is like Ayn Rand’s monumental Atlas Shrugged (1957)─both present blueprints for the future and have been potential sources for social change. Looking Backward launched a national political movement based on a system of scientific and systematic socialism as readers of the day embraced Bellamy’s novel. By the early 1890s, there were 165 Bellamy Clubs. In Looking Backward, Bellamy called his ideology “nationalism,” and never used the term “socialism.” This ideology viewed the nation as collectively activated in the pursuit of sustenance and survival. As a philosophy of collective control of the nation’s economy, its goal was to rationalize the functions of production and distribution. To this day, many American intellectuals have been attracted to such a system of economic paternalism.
“Julian West, a thirty-year-old privileged aristocrat in 1887 Boston, is the main character and narrator of Looking Backward. Having been born into an upper class family, he thought himself to be superior to the working masses and believed that he deserved his privileged life. West is the third generation of his family to have a great deal of money. He is set to marry Edith Bartlett when a house he is having built is completed. Strikes had delayed the completion of West’s house and he, therefore, simply viewed labor conditions as an annoyance due to the setbacks in its construction. He looked at strikes with anger and disdain. West was unconcerned about the great divide between the rich and poor and the gaps between social classes.
“On May 30, 1887, Decoration Day, Julian attends ceremonies celebrating and remembering Civil War veterans with Edith Bartlett and her family. He suffers from a sleeping disorder, and upon returning home, he retires to his soundproof and fireproof underground sleeping chamber. In the secluded vaulted bedroom, Dr. Pillsbury, a trained mesmerist, puts Julian into a deep trancelike sleep. Only Dr. Pillsbury and Julian’s servant, Sawyer, knew how to wake him. That night the house burns down and Julian is assumed to have died in the fire along with Sawyer. Edith also thought that Julian had perished. Even she did not know about the sleeping disorder, the hypnosis, and the sleeping chamber. The basement vault is not discovered and West is left undisturbed to sleep for 113 years with his organs and functions in a state of suspended animation.
“In the year 2000, Dr. Leete, a retired physician, discovers the vault and Julian’s ageless and uncorrupted body (he has not aged a day) when he is excavating for a new laboratory. The excavation reveals the hidden cellar and West’s perfectly preserved body. When Julian awakens he meets Dr. and Mrs. Leete and their daughter, Edith, and he finds himself in very unfamiliar territory─the 20th century is vastly different from the 19th. Throughout the rest of the novel West questions Leete about the changes that had occurred. As a spokesman for the 20th century and for Bellamy’s ideas on social reform, Dr. Leete systematically and rationally answers Julian’s questions and responds to his concerns. In turn, West serves a spokesman for Bellamy’s 19th century audience. It is through West’s eyes that the reader views the contrasts between the old order and the new utopia.
“Leete explains that the year 2000’s collaborative utopian society is a logical outcome of the 19th century’s rapid industrialization. The new society is a natural evolution of the economy that resulted from the advances of large-scale production. In the year 2000, there is a system of publicly-owned capital with the government controlling the nation’s total production and distributing the national output equally among all citizens. The 19th century’s system of monopolistic capitalism had somehow evolved and merged into government. Large companies had formed monopolies that eventually became nationalized » (http://www.quebecoislibre.org/11/111015-5.html)
If we take a closer look at the plot, we find that it hinges on four themes: (1) centrality of public life, (2) equality of labor, (3) elimination of money, and (4) scientific socialism.
“Scientific socialism is a response to the excesses of individualism as perceived by nineteenth century social reformers. Why, they asked, should the technical specifications necessary for perfected government be left to human will and idiosyncrasies? Can we not leave technical matters to machines, or at least to governments that function like machines?” ‘As the machine is truer than the hand, so the system which in a great concern does the work of the master's eye in a small business, turns out more accurate results’ (p. 55)” (https://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/149/149syllabus6bellamy.html)
At least one young German, who, in Germany, was to become a pioneer for racial hygiene as well as a fierce opponent to racism, fell under the spell of “Looking Backward”.
“Through a policy of rational selection (Wilhelm) Schallmayer (1867-1919) thought to create the kind of meritocratic state envisioned by Bellamy” (Sheila Faith Weiss, Race Hygiene and National Efficiency: The Eugenics of Wilhelm Schallmayer, p. 63); through a policy of rational selection carried out, under the all-pervasive authority of doctors, in a totalitarian state where these, that is, those who were able to place regard for the social consequences of inherited psychiatric illnesses above the welfare of individual patients, were to be substituted for Plato’s philosophers (P. Weindling, Health, race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945, p. 86) ; to Schallmayer, and, in that respect, he can hardly be proved wrong, these “rare pearls”, remained to be found. Anyway, each citizen would have to carry a health passport, to be kept to date with a yearly medical inspection (Paul Weindling, "Conceptualizing eugenics and racial hygiene as public health theory and practice", in Johannes Kananen, Sophy Bergenheim, Merle Wessel [eds.], Conceptualising Public Health: Historical and Contemporary Struggles over Key Concepts) and compulsory medical tribunals to be set.
Was he a visionary?
*see, for an introduction to the Foucauldian concept of “biopolitics”, Michael Laurence, "Biopolitics and State Regulation of Human Life", www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756223/obo-9780199756223-0170.xml ; for an in-depth study, Marina Basu, "Biopolitics or the legislation of life: a Foucauldian analysis", LSU Digital Commons, LSU Master's Theses, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, 2006.
** How about, to make this statement even more insightful than it is, reversing the two clauses, so as to read it as follows: “the security of those who govern the population, and, consequently, of the population.”
In this time of algorithmically run universal enforced care, it may be a good idea to reflect on some of the accounts given by ancient authors on medicine, particularly, when it comes to the origin of that art, on Pliny’s and, with respect to the traditional Roman attitude toward it, Cato’s, which would be both shocking for current mentalities.
“Natural History” (XXX, 2.1) says: “I should have been inclined to think that Orpheus had been the first to introduce gradually into a country so near his own superstitions and medicine, were it not the fact that Thrace, his dwelling place, was at that time totally stranger to the magic art” (“Orphea putarem e propinquo primum intulisse, ad vicina usque, superstitionem ac medicinae profectum, si non expers sedes ejus tota Thrace magices fuisset”). Contrary to a common interpretation that can be found in all the literature on the issue, Pliny does “(not) (call) magic the offspring of medicine” (Thomas Joseph Pettigrew, On Superstitions Connected with the History and Practice of Medicine and Surgery, p. 24): he puts them on the same level. This linkage, that may be surprising to modern people, who believe diseases to be occasioned by “natural causes”, can be easily explained by the ancient belief that they were caused by evil forces penetrating clandestinely into the human organism, and that they could be cured only through healing rituals requiring the recitation of incantations or charms.
These forces are wide-ranging and the ways in which they take hold of man are also very varied.
The Chaldeans imagined the world to be full of invisible spirits, constantly busy harming people. These evil spirits, known as “spirits of darkness” or “trap-drivers,” lived everywhere, in the air, in the depths of the water, in the depths of the earth. They were the cause of disease. In fact, we see among the Chaldeans as well as among the Assyrians the existence of spirits, each having the power to cause a particular disease in a particular part of the body. For example, Namtar and Idpa, Plague and Fever, were two demons always distinct from the other, with clear-cut personal attributes. For Persians, physical suffering, as well as moral suffering, came from evil spirits called “Devas”. Ancient Babylonians lived in a world haunted by evil spirits. “Whenever they fell ill, they believed that they had been seized by one of these spirits. In their suffering and impurity they sought medical aid and a return to their previous condition. The function of the healer (who was a priest) was to help them achieve this end by removing the cause of their illness. Patients were required to atone for their sins and the angry gods had to be placated” (James Longrigg, Greek Rational Medicine, 1988, p. 6). As in ancient Israel (see Leviticus 13), the disease was considered as an evidence of sin. Cases of deliberate instrumentalisation of virulent disease by authorities have been documented in ancient Mesopotamia (Mary Beard, Pagan Priests: Religion and Power in the Ancient World, 1990, p. 136; incidentally, it may be remarked that, in some African tribes, prospective candidates for priesthood receive a call either by being possessed by a deity or through illness, see G. F. Kojo Arthu, Cloth as Metaphor: (Re)Reading the Adinkra Cloth: Symbols of the Akan of Ghana, Second Edition, 2017). Less incidentally, it has been noted that “the Christianization of pagan Europe and Indian Mexico was coincident with epidemics of acute and chronic infectious disease that undermined the structure and functioning of pagan and Indian societies, respectively” (Daniel T. Reff, Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New, 2005, p. 1-2). In “Discipline and Punish”, Foucault draws attention to a set of governmental measures and regulations designed to deal with plague outbreaks in the XVIIth century: “partitioning of space and closing off houses, constant inspection and registration. Processes of quarantine and purification operate. The plague is met by order. Lepers were also separated from society, but the aim behind this was to create a pure community. The plague measures aim at a disciplined community. The plague stands as an image against which the idea of discipline was created. The existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring and supervising abnormal beings brings into play the disciplinary mechanisms created by the fear of the plague. All modern mechanisms for controlling abnormal individuals derive from these” (https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/disciplinepunish/section7/; as to who exactly the “abnormal ones” are nowadays, see www.france24.com/en/20200425-singing-italians-celebrate-wwii-liberation-at-windows:
“Locked down Romans sang an anti-Fascist resistance song out of windows Saturday as Italy celebrated the 75th anniversary of its liberation by Allied forces during World War II.
“Jet planes buzzed across Rome's azure skies but other festivities were cancelled because of a coronavirus outbreak that has officially claimed more than 26,000 lives in the Mediterranean country.
The day's big invent involved everyone joining a singalong from their windows of ‘Bella Ciao’ -- an old protest song that turned into Italy's unofficial anti-Fascist anthem
“Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte often refers to the pandemic as Italy's greatest challenge since 1945” In many “Western countries”, the fight against C-19 has been branded by bureauc-rats [no offense intended to these animals, vivisected, as others, by demented sadistic criminals] as “the biggest crisis since WW2”).
Resuming the overview of medicine in early times, in the Rig-Veda, late hymns, that is, hymns which have non-, if not anti-Aryan, elements, contain songs that have the power to cast out the demons of sickness (Kenneth G. Zysk, Medicine in the Veda: Religious Healing in the Veda, 1985) ; “the foundation of Vedic medicine was a belief in a multitude of benevolent and malevolent deities or spirit that populated the cosmos and caused good and bad effects in the human realm” (Kenneth G. Zysk, p. xiv ; emphasis mine).
In ancient Egypt, it was believed that diseases were often produced by evil spirits that entered the human body and betrayed their presence by more or less serious disorders. The most that could be done to relieve the patient from the external effects was to treat the effects of the disease, and the only way to achieve complete healing was to remove the root cause of the disease by prayerfully removing the possessed spirit. A good doctor's prescription consisted of two parts: a magic formula and a medical one. Magico-religious medicine was thus coupled with so-called empirical medicine, which implies attempts at providing a rational explanation of the origin of diseases.
Indeed, beliefs existed that the cause of disease lies in a change of position or in the disappearance of one of the parts of the body; in the penetration of a foreign substance or even of an animal; in its economy. In “Egypt (, that) was the medical center of the ancient world (...) there were specialists even at that day, for every part of the body. They were thoroughly conversant with such hygienic measures as baths, body massage, and inunctions. They studied food from the point of view of health, appreciated the role played by vermin in disease and practiced fumigation as a means of offsetting epidemics” (Walter G. Bazan, Healing Hands: The Natural Healing Arts, p. 7).
Theoretical systems of medicine free from magical elements evolved first in Greece. They were however not free of religious elements. “There is a striking coincidence between the accounts which have been given of the medical divinities among the Greeks, and those of the Egyptians, though it may be doubted whether the Greeks derived their knowledge of the art from the latter people. Like the Isis and Osiris, Apollo and Minerva became the gods of physic in Greece, and Orpheus, who was said to be the son of Apollo and Calliope, performed the part of Thouth; instructing his countrymen in the mysteries of religion, in poetry, and in medicine. According to some chronologists, however, Melampus is reported to have flourished considerably before his time, and to have distinguished himself by his medical skill; of which he gave a remarkable proof in the cure of the daughters of Proetus, king of Argos, who were attacked with leprosy and madness. Afterwards it would appear that all the chief heroes of Greece, and particularly those of the Argonautic and Trojan expeditions, were more or less versed in the physical art; in which they are said to have received their in instruction from Chiron the Thessalian, surnamed the Centaur. Cephalus, AEsculapius, Melanion, Nestor, Amphiaraus, Peleus, Telamon, Meleagrus, Theseus, Hippolytus, Palamedes, Ulysses, Menestheus, Diomedes, Caltor, Polydeuces, Machaon, Podalirius, Antilochus, AEneas, and Achilles, are all mentioned by Xenophon as the pupils of Chiron. Of these by far the most celebrated is AEsculapius, or Asclepios, the reputed son of Apollo and Coronis. He was probably a Thessalian prince; and he is described as particularly successful in the cure of external diseases. That, indeed, his merits must have been very extraordinary for the age in which he lived, seems proved by the fable, that Jupiter was obliged to remove him from the world, to prevent the growing indifference of mankind towards the gods, and the desolation of Pluto's kingdom. Some time after his death, divine honours began to be paid him; in consequence, chiefly, of his descendants devoting themselves to the medical profession; pretending to have derived their knowledge immediately from him, and ascribing all the cures, which they effected to his direct influence. His sons, Podalirius and Machaon, have acquired a durable celebrity from the mention which the author of the Iliad has made of their surgical skill.
“From the Trojan war till the age of Hippocrates, the art of medicine continued chiefly in the hands of the priests, who exercised it for their own profit in the temples of the gods” (“Medicine”, The Cyclopædia, Vol. XXIII). Indeed, after Aesculapius’ death, divine honours were paid to him, he was designated as the god of physic and temples were erected to him in various parts of Greece. His descendants were named Asclepiades. They were the priests of his temples. In Greece, as in Egypt, in Israel, as well as, at the time the Sushruta Samhita, one of the two foundational Hindu treatises on the medical profession, was compiled, in late Vedic India (Richard G. Olson [ed.], Technology and Science in Ancient Civilizations, p. 139), the art of medicine was entirely entrusted to priests. Knowledge of anatomy and pathology was derived by priests and their assistants from animal sacrifice (“comparative medicine”). Wherever women were admitted on an equal footing with men or, a fortiori, where they enjoyed a very considerable role, they acted as priestesses and therefore as “healers”, too (see, chap.2: “Les femmes-médecins primitives” ; the first recorded female doctor was the Egyptian Mer-Swnur Pesehet [Joseph A. Bailey, II, M.D., F.A.C.S., Echoes of Ancient African Values, 2005, p. 155). Some have it that women were actually the first healers (“Why is primitive medicine called witchcraft and not wizardcraft ? Undoubtedly, this designation reflects traditional patriarchy. However, there might be a rational basis as well for designating primitive medicine as a witchcraft practiced by women. Most probably, the earliest healers were women. The knowledge of the relationship between coitus and conception must have come thousands of years after a sufficient number of Homo sapiens inhabited the earth. Both by natural instincts and by intelligence, the mother must have been the sole caretaker of the newborn. The care of the baby could have extended to the care of the community. It may be conjectured with a great deal of certainty that women were the harbingers of medical science at whatever level it existed many thousands years ago, much before the birth of any discipline of medicine as we know it now. But they discovered medicine and not witchcraft. At this stage, men might have provided ancillary help, but no more. Only with the emergence of a hierarchy in the medical profession and the power that could be exercised through medicine came the sorcerers, the magicians, the medicine men” [Daya Ram Varma, The Art and Science of Healing Since Antiquity, p. 81]). The first bureaucrats (who appeared in ancient Mesopotamia) were certainly men: in the ‘West”, where the first one was created by popes (see Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution, the Formation of the Western Legal Tradition), bureaucracies are now actual “gynocea”, headed, to be sure, by men in most cases: for how long?
In Greece, “the patients were taught to expect a cure, or at least to learn the means of obtaining it, in dreams, for which they were previously prepared, or rather stupefied, by a course of imposing ceremonies. The temples were generally situated in the neighbourhood of rivers, or mineral springs, and in elevated situations, where the influence of the fresh air, and the beauty of the surrounding prospects, were likely to excite cheerful ideas, and to conduce to the recovery of the patient. Bathing was an indispensable part of the initiatory process; and this, conjoined with the strict abstinence which was enforced, doubtless often effected a cure. When recovery took place, the patients were led, from gratitude, to present various offerings to the deity of the place; sometimes pieces of money were thrown into the spring where they had bathed, or from which they had drunk; at other times drawings and images of the diseased parts, or tablets descriptive of the disorder and cure, together with the names of the patients, were suspended in the temples. These narratives (...) must have doubtless contributed to the progress of the art, and supplied the successive generations of priests with some useful practical observations. The temples in which they were recorded, particularly those of the Alclepiades, became, in fact, so many medical schools, differing however from one another, and that often materially, in their doctrines and practice. Thus, the Cnidian school distinguished itself by its strict empiricism; while that of Cos had more of a dogmatical charaćter, laying much stress on the knowledge of the exciting causes, and the prognosis of disease, and pursuing a more methodic and rational mode of treatment. The former produced Euryphon (...), and Ctesias, of whose Persian history some fragments have been preserved by Photius; in the latter was developed the genius of Hippocrates”, a member of the hereditary priesthood of the temple of AEsculapius at Cos” (“Medicine”, The Cyclopædia, Vol. XXIII).
To find, despite pretty compelling evidence, “paradoxical that rational medicine should have developed from such an environment (temple practice)” (James Longrigg, op. cit., p. 22) amounts more or less to finding paradoxical that theatre should have developed from religious ceremonies in honour of Dionysus., especially when one acknowledges that “the divine healer (did) not disdain the use of magical drugs and the use of supernatural powers” (ibid., p. 25); “the healing dispensed within the precincts of the temples of Asclepius (may have been) conceived with the human doctor’s practice at its model (...) (i)t was (...) essentially ‘a secular medicine... but with an injection of supernatural power’” (ibid.). Hippocrates is still held responsible for the emancipation of medicine from magic on the basis of a theory (the four humours’) that would lay the foundations of a mechanistic approach of the former: causes of diseases were now located exclusively in the material realm. “His greatest contribution was diagnosis. It was he who established the principle that knowledge of disease rests primarily upon careful observation and notation of symptoms” (Walter G. Bazan, Healing Hands: The Natural Healing Arts, p. 8); besides “(s)ome of his divisions of disease have scarcely been modified and words spoken by our physicians (...) are found in his writings with the same meaning as at present; such as acute and chronic, epidemic, and sporadic, malignant and benign, and so on” (ibid.).
On one account, however, Hippocrates’ theoretical perspective on medicine delayed the advent of Pasteurian dogmas and their (deadly) applications. “The Hippocratic doctor does not believe any more in magico-religious ‘miasmata’ that pollute whole populations; he accuses the environmental air, thus freeing his fellow-men from the fear of gods’ wrath but impeding the rise of the concept of contagion (...)” (http://www.academie-medecine.fr/deux-etapes-dans-lhistoire-de-la-notion-de-contagion-dhippocrate-a-galien-2/). Long before Arab physicians, to whom the pharmaceutical industry owes early hypotheses related to bacteriology and microbiology, “discovered” them (Lawrence I. Conrad, A Ninth-Century Muslim Scholar's Discussion, in Lawrence I. Conrad et Dominik Wujastyk [eds.], Contagion: Perspectives from Pre-Modern Societies, 2000), the first to have envisaged the existence of contagious diseases, by observing a few cases of plague in Minor Asia, seems to have been Galen (https://infectiousdiseases.edwardworthlibrary.ie/theory-of-contagion/). Early ideas about contagion can be traced back to several VIIth century Hadiths attributed to Muhammad which affirmed the contagious nature of leprosy, scabies and sexually transmitted diseases, and actually extend back to pre-Islamic Arabia (Lawrence I. Conrad, op. cit.).
Coming back once more to the history of medicine in early Greece, “(a)t first, they were only the actual descendants of Æsculapius who were instructed in the art: afterwards other persons were admitted as pupils, having previously undergone a particular initiation, and bound themselves by an oath to conform to the rules of the Alclepiades. Some philosophers of comprehensive genius, however, accustomed to speculate on the origin of things, the nature of man, &c. had already begun to extend their researches to medicine, and succeeded in rescuing the study, to a certain degree, from the dominion of the priests. Of these benefactors of their race, no one is more deserving of mention than Pythagoras, who, after visiting Egypt and India in quest of knowledge, returned to his own country and established the school of Crotona. He applied himself to the study of the animal economy; introduced a regular system of dietetics; and did not neglect the practice of medicine. His attempts to explain every thin by the power of numbers, were, indeed, sufficiently ridiculous; and his therapeutical maxims differed scarcely from those of the temples; but the rules of regimen which he inculcated were generally speaking, very judicious, and implied considerable powers of observation; though they have, no doubt, been carried to an extravagant length by his followers. Among his immediate disciples, Alcmaeon is celebrated as the inventor of anatomy and though his knowledge of the internal structure of the human frame may be disputed, yet the concurring testimonies of Aristotle, Diogenes, and Plutarch, abundantly prove that he made no inconsiderable figure as a comparative anatomist. He is also the author of the first theory of sleep. ‘When the blood,’ he says, ‘returns into the larger blood-vessels, sleep is induced', when it is again distributed, waking occurs; but a complete congestion is followed by death.” (Plutarch de Plac. Philos. lib.v. c. 23.) (...).
Early references to physicians or the art of medicine were favourable. One century later, by the IVth, criticism was rampant – in non-medical texts ; criticisms included accusations that the fatal outcomes was the physician’s fault and that physicians refused to take on intractable cases and take credit for healing patients who would have recovered in any case (Steven M. Oberhelman [ed.], Dreams, Healing, and Medicine in Greece: From Antiquity to the Present, p. 94-5) . Contemporary medical treatises imputed these things to the sudden appearance, itself due to “widespread use of writing among the bona fide medical profession”, of flocks of poorly trained doctors (see www.researchgate.net/publication/292062043_Literacy_and_the_charlatan_in_ancient_Greek_medicine). Well, the fact is that physicians have always tended to “try to demarcate themselves from the Other ( others physicians)” by calling them “charlatans”, only to be returned the favour by “the Other” (Peter E. Pormann, The Physician and the Other: Images of the Charlatan in Medieval Islam, in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 79, No. 2 [Summer 2005], pp. 189-22).
Cato - by whose time, the right of citizenship having been granted by Cesar to all those who practised medicine or taught liberal arts. doctors, among whom many women, flocked in droves from Greece, where women were permitted to openly study and practice medicine on other women and on children, to Rome, where, by a kind of contagion, many matronae followed suit, bringing out their “healing” side (Mélina Lipinska, Histoire des femmes médecins depuis l'antiquité jusqu'à nos jours, p. 70 sqq.; A. McClanan, K. Encarnación [eds.], The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation, and Marriage in Premodern Europe, p. 34) - wrote to his son: “Concerning those Greeks, son Marcus, I will speak to you more at length on the befitting occasion. I will show you the results of my own experience at Athens, and that, while it is a good plan to dip into their literature, it is not worth while to make a thorough acquaintance with it. They are a most iniquitous and intractable race, and you may take my word as the word of a prophet, when I tell you, that whenever that nation shall bestow its literature upon Rome it will mar everything; and that all the sooner, if it sends its physicians among us. They have conspired among themselves to murder all barbarians with their medicine; a profession which they exercise for lucre, in order that they may win our confidence, and dispatch us all the more easily.” (Pliny, XXIX, 7) Neither respirators nor “antiviral” drugs had been invented yet: poisoning could only be effected by expedient means (this does not mean that all doctors are poisoners: www.bitchute.com/video/LnZcV2UzraLz/ ; www.bitchute.com/video/oE6yjNkMSkbv/.
Echoing Cato, the following passage from Pliny (XXIV, 1) is even more premonitory: “It is in tendencies of this description that the medical art first took its rise; though it was originally intended, no doubt, by Nature, that our only medicaments should be those which universally exist, are everywhere to be found, and are to he procured at no great outlay, the various substances, in fact, from which we derive our sustenance. But at a later period the fraudulent disposition of mankind, combined with an ingenuity prompted by lucre, invented those various laboratories, in which each one of us is promised an extension of his life—that is, if he will pay for it. Compositions and mixtures of an in- explicable nature forthwith have their praises sung, and the productions of Arabia and India are held in unbounded admiration in the very midst of us. For some trifling sore or other, a medicament is prescribed from the shores of the Red Sea; while not a day passes but what the real remedies are to be found upon the tables of the very poorest man among us. But if the remedies for diseases were derived from our own gardens, if the plants or shrubs were employed which grow there, there would be no art, forsooth, that would rank lower than that of medicine.
“Yes, avow it we must-the Roman people, in extending its empire, has lost sight of its ancient manners, and in that we have conquered we are the conquered: for now we obey the natives of foreign lands, who by the agency of a single art have even out-generalled our generals (...).”
Medicine was rejected by some Church fathers (Marcion, Arnobius, Tatian, Tertulian) because of its elements of magic and demonology, or, more precisely, these warned their readers not to trust medicine alone and not to rely on doctors alone (these being obviously potential competitors for priests), but, in the end, Denis Müller (“Les passions de l'agir juste”) goes on in a chapter on the contribution of Christianity to “medical ethics”, the distinction between health and salvation, corresponding to that between body and soul, made possible a positive appreciation of medicine, especially under the influence of Hellenistic Judaism. In a more comprehensive study (Gary B. Ferngren, Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity, reviewed at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6027019/; muse.jhu.edu/book/3348), it is shown that to infer from the Gospels that religious healing, which is featured prominently in them, was normative among early Christians is a misapprehension (on the other hand, some 150 Christian physicians can be identified with reasonable certainty from the Roman imperial period, where the imagery of the “christus medicus” developed, see Gary B. Ferngren, Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity, p. 105) ; that early Christians accepted a naturalistic view of disease causation, rejecting the belief that ordinary diseases were caused by demons and that healing was possible through exorcism; that Christian medical philanthropy, which, motivated by Christ-like agapeic service, was reflected in charity (business) and the creation of hospitals (this was the best place to incite people to make or change their will in favour of the Church; see Martin de La Soudière, Les testaments et actes de dernière volonté à la fin du Moyen Age, in Ethnologie française nouvelle serie, T. 5 [1975], pp. 57-80), developed in urban church during the first three centuries.
“The Healing Imperative:The Early Church and the Invention of Medicine as We Know It” does not do justice to its title (see, however, for interesting hints, stpaulcenter.com/modern-medicine-is-based-on-christianity/), yet more comprehensive studies, such as “Medicine and Religion: A Historical Introduction” by Gary B. Ferngren show that it would be a mistake to take it lightly, debunking various myths related to the attitude of Christianity towards science in general and medicine in particular, pointing out that “recent studies have shown that Christianity often nurtured and encouraged scientific and medical endeavours (...)” (ibid., p. 4), and giving as examples the active support given by Christian clergymen to the introduction of vaccination, inoculation and anaesthesia against the advice of many in the profession (ibid.) ; www.cmf.org.uk/resources/publications/content/?context=article&id=827 , too, is to be mentioned.