Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

the masters of nature ... Instead of waiting for the
slow operations of nature to eliminate a supposed
morbid matter from the body, art should take the
business out of her hands.” (13-4)
In short, as Black summarizes the demeanor of Western medicine,
in particular as practiced in America, “[A]lthough doctors may
acknowledge the body’s healing power in speculation, in practice
scientific medicine’s most fundamental premise directs them to
become nature’s masters” (14). In the world conceived by
Western medicine, reality and “truth” were dualistic, ordered,
static, and universal. And because of physicians’ knowledge of
the anatomical and physiological workings of world, they had
control and authority over the “mystery” beneath its skin. It
was a world of scientific and medical certainty – and they were
the masters of that certainty. Again, the attraction of that
“star,” as Richard Weaver had described it, that was Western
science, and medicine, was undeniable and difficult to resist.
When, then, references are made to teachers as “doctors,”
“curing” students of bad grammar, bad spelling, bad structure,
and, very well, bad thinking, as a stricken patient would be
treated for some infectious disease, what does such an analogy
really mean?
With religion as well as science and medicine behind us, I
arrive now at the last of those three broader social and
cultural forces that, as I have said, I believe had converged
like some “perfect storm” in nineteenth century America to
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