Time and Medicine

4 January 2000 | Volume 132 Issue 1 | Pages 3-9

Although historians work with the record of events in public time, they have not developed an explicit understanding of lived time. To set the stage for the other essays in this issue of Annals, this introductory essay explores how an understanding of lived or "private" time began to emerge in the early 20th century in the works of that era's major thinkers: Henri Bergson's philosophy of duration, Émile Durkheim's social time, Sigmund Freud's five psychoanalytic temporal narratives, and Eugene Minkowski's exploration of lived time.

This essay then considers the reaction against the burden of history that began with the great 19th-century historicizers: Comte, Hegel, Marx, Darwin, and Spencer. It reflects on the effort, beginning in those years, of modern artists and intellectuals to focus on the personal past in place of the overbearing burden of the historical past. New ways of experiencing the present, made possible by new communication technologies, including the telephone and telegraph, have centered on the experience of simultaneity. Norbert Wiener's cybernetics, Marshall McLuhan's globalism, and the Internet have further transformed how both the medical and lay communities experience past, present, and future, as well as near and far. The discussion concludes with consideration of Eurotransplant, an Internet-based information and action network used by physicians to coordinate organ transplantation; it is a system that integrates cybernetics, globalism, and the Internet in an everyday, real drama of the electronic age of simultaneity.

Author and Article Information

From Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois.

Note: A small portion of this work is reprinted with permission from: Kern S. The Culture of Time and Space. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ Pr; 1983.

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