Word: social
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Scotland, during the depression of the 1930s, gastritis increased by 120%, nervous debility by 100%. In the U.S., he says, social disintegration is proceeding so fast that even Negroes, once almost immune, are getting peptic ulcers; from 1936 to 1945, the incidence of ulcers among whites increased 44%, among Negroes...
Western civilization's case history as drawn up by Dr. Halliday shows political and cultural symptoms, too: "social fragmentation," revealed by a rash of class warfare; increasing "intrusion of manifestations of the primitive and visceral," with "love becoming no longer sacramental but excremental"; a decline in religious faith, and loss of man's sense of his origins and destiny...
...Cure. "It is neither sense nor science to concentrate our thoughts and endeavors on the physical aspects of nature to the neglect of its spiritual or psychological aspects," writes Dr. Halliday; "it is by comprehension of these alone that man can consciously save himself from further social catastrophe and even destruction...
Medicine's Job? Doctors must get better training in psychosomatic medicine, learn to recognize the serious biological effects of social sickness. A new kind of "group practice" would help them understand psychosocial medicine; the group should include doctors, social workers, nurses, clerks to take care of records, representatives of government health & welfare departments, perhaps of industry. The group might decide that while the symptoms were the patient's, the causes were society's, and recommend changes...
...Economic and social life is inconceivable without liberty. ... It cannot be a liberty which merely denies state regulation. Neither can it be the pseudo-liberty of our present day wherein man is asked to submit his individuality to the will and fancy of gigantic organizations. Genuine and healthy liberty can be only that of men who, feeling themselves solidly bound together in a team to ensure a good social economy, acquire the right to insist on its guarantee and protection without violation of individual liberty...