Science & Tech Quote by Thomas Szasz

Szasz lands the line like a scalpel: a neat historical flip that flatters modern rationality just long enough to indict it. The first clause nods to the old story of progress - superstition replaced by evidence - but the second clause reverses the moral, suggesting we have not escaped enchantment so much as upgraded its costume. If medieval people confused charms for cures, contemporary people risk treating the clinic itself as a shrine, mistaking the authority of medicine for a kind of secular miracle-working.

The intent is less anti-science than anti-credulity. Szasz is attacking the cultural habit of outsourcing meaning, fear, and responsibility to institutions that speak in the language of certainty. "Medicine for magic" is a jab at the way diagnosis can become destiny, prescription can become absolution, and medical jargon can launder value judgments into "neutral" facts. The subtext: when religion loses its grip, something else will eagerly fill the explanatory and moral vacuum; medicine, armed with real power and social prestige, is a prime candidate.

Context matters. Szasz built his reputation criticizing mainstream psychiatry, especially involuntary commitment and the expansion of "mental illness" into a catch-all category for social deviance and personal suffering. Read through that lens, the quote is a warning about medicalization: turning messy human problems into treatable conditions not only for help, but for control. The wit works because it doesn’t deny medicine’s successes; it questions our hunger to treat those successes as proof that every form of pain has a clinical key - and that the key should be held by experts.