Science Quote by Ashley Montagu

Montagu’s line reads like a compliment, but it’s really a diagnosis. He frames medical education as an “assembly line,” a metaphor that turns the training of healers into industrial production: efficient, standardized, emotionally sanitized. In that setting, the revelation isn’t delivered as a principle in a lecture; it’s smuggled in through behavior. “Not so much by what he said but by what he did” is Montagu’s sharpest move, because it implies that the formal curriculum often performs empathy while rewarding detachment. Caring can’t survive as a slogan; it has to be modeled, witnessed, and risked.

The phrase “some medical schools” is pointedly faint praise. Montagu suggests that humane medicine appears as an exception, dependent on a single faculty member who disrupts the factory logic. That’s the subtext: compassion isn’t institutionally guaranteed; it’s precarious, carried person-to-person, vulnerable to being crushed by throughput, hierarchy, and the hidden curriculum that teaches students what counts as “professional.”

“Intimate relation between curing and caring” also rejects a common bargain in modern medicine: that technical competence and emotional presence are separable skills, with the latter treated as optional bedside “softness.” Montagu, writing from a mid-20th-century humanist scientific tradition, pushes back against a postwar drift toward specialization and mechanization. He’s not anti-science; he’s warning that when medicine mistakes the body for a machine, it trains doctors to fix parts while forgetting the person attached.