"The doctor has been taught to be interested not in health but in disease. What the public is taught is that health is the cure for disease"
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Montagu’s line lands like a polite accusation: modern medicine, for all its lifesaving glamour, is structurally addicted to pathology. The jab isn’t at individual physicians but at a training pipeline and an economy that reward naming, categorizing, and treating “disease” far more reliably than cultivating the messy, unbillable conditions of “health.” He’s pointing at an institutional gaze: doctors are educated to look for what’s wrong because that’s what can be measured, coded, published, reimbursed, and defended in court.
The second sentence flips the knife toward the public. We’re taught to treat “health” not as a lived state but as a consumer product, something you purchase back after it’s been taken. Health becomes a cure - reactive, episodic, and market-friendly - instead of a proactive ecology involving housing, food systems, labor conditions, and social connection. That’s the subtext: wellness is political, but it’s been privatized into personal responsibility and clinical intervention.
Context matters. Montagu, an anthropologist and humanistic scientist, spent a career arguing that biology is inseparable from culture - that our bodies are shaped by environments, stressors, and social arrangements. Read in the late-20th-century rise of specialization and hospital-centered care, the quote anticipates today’s arguments about preventive medicine, social determinants of health, and why a system can be excellent at heroic rescue while remaining mediocre at keeping people well.
The rhetoric works because it’s a mirror held up to two forms of miseducation: professional tunnel vision and public magical thinking. It doesn’t scold; it reframes what we’ve been trained to want from medicine in the first place.
The second sentence flips the knife toward the public. We’re taught to treat “health” not as a lived state but as a consumer product, something you purchase back after it’s been taken. Health becomes a cure - reactive, episodic, and market-friendly - instead of a proactive ecology involving housing, food systems, labor conditions, and social connection. That’s the subtext: wellness is political, but it’s been privatized into personal responsibility and clinical intervention.
Context matters. Montagu, an anthropologist and humanistic scientist, spent a career arguing that biology is inseparable from culture - that our bodies are shaped by environments, stressors, and social arrangements. Read in the late-20th-century rise of specialization and hospital-centered care, the quote anticipates today’s arguments about preventive medicine, social determinants of health, and why a system can be excellent at heroic rescue while remaining mediocre at keeping people well.
The rhetoric works because it’s a mirror held up to two forms of miseducation: professional tunnel vision and public magical thinking. It doesn’t scold; it reframes what we’ve been trained to want from medicine in the first place.
Quote Details
| Topic | Health |
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