While they were mindful of and grateful for the powerful advances in medicine, they believed that social and economic conditions which influenced the life of a person and a community had a greater impact on a person’s life and health than did the power and might of all of medicine.

They believed that medicine was a profession that involved more than a technical set of skills and a high income. They accepted the responsibility of caring for the whole person; mind, body and soul.

The bureaucratization of medicine with increasingly complex rules, codes, algorithms, prompts, bylaws, schedules, and administrative structure is leaving its mark, but medicine at its fundamental is still about suffering, healing, and comforting; it is about individuals; it is about relationships and trust; it is about stories.

The lackeys of capitalism compete to become employee of the month, just as the donors of Never Let Me Go take a pride in their donations. In both cases, the system has indoctrinated them so successfully that they’ve ended up perfectly willing to accept their part in an apparently unalterable scheme of things.

[N]ew anti-drug campaign may succeed where others have failed, grabbing teens’ attentions by appealing to their vanity. “The thinking is that this will give kids a tangible image of what can happen if they get involved in using hard drugs,” [Deputy Bret] King says. “We did want to appeal to their sense of vanity. It’s less abstract than telling someone they’ll get lung cancer many years down the line. This is something you can actually see right now.”

Marcus Welby was not necessarily the inspiration here, of course. Alienation – and the dissatisfaction that comes with a midlife crisis — pervaded the zeitgeist in the seventies.

Whatever happened to alienation, anyway? Perhaps it fell along with the Berlin Wall. Or succumbed to Prozac.