Vasyl Yakovych Danylevskyi's lecture on the doctor, the patient, and the successes of medicine (1921): annotated translation

Abstract

Unlike a mechanic, in front of a doctor there is a human being with all the manifestations of the feelings, with a painful soul, with aggravated egoistic intentions. The public easily forgives great failures and blunders of a quack but not a doctor. The doctor's duty is to forget about his personal troubles for the sake of his weak patient and to instill in him cheerfulness, spiritual fortitude, and optimistic expectations. In functional nervous disorders, the doctor can limit himself to psychotherapy only. A family doctor deserves greater respect and trust. A profound knowledge of all medicine is absolutely necessary for any specialized doctor. The doctor is obliged to serve public health – to supervise schools, factories, markets, railways, etc. The success of scientific medicine is not always known to the low-cultural public due to their insufficient popularization by the doctors. However, over the past 50 years, scientific medicine and medical practice have made tremendous progress: local and general anesthesia for operations, antisepsis and asepsis have been applied in surgery, organ transplant operations have been performed, vaccinations against cholera and bubonic plague in humans have been introduced, a new science – medical bacteriology has been founded, a successful fight against epidemic contagious diseases has been carried out, diagnostic reactions to typhoid fever, syphilis, Pasteur institutes have been established; fluoroscopy, chemotherapy are carried out, salvarsan has been invented to treat syphilis and relapsing fever; the therapeutic use of light rays and electrotherapy has begun; study of immunity, innate and acquired, anaphylaxis, study of immunity both innate and acquired, anaphylaxis, scientific psychiatry and psychotherapy is being developed, etc.