Speed: The Challenge to Medicine in the New Era

In this world there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time  … . The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along  … . Each time is true, but the truths are not the same (1).

At its most basic level, the coming of a millennium has strictly to do with calendars. As such, it is an arbitrary, culture-bound event, a point underscored by the realization that even the nominal starting date for the new era, 1 January 2000, is wrong. It is a year early, because Dionysius Exiguus, the 6th-century Roman monk who created the calendar we now use, began his new calendar with the year 1 (Roman mathematics lacked the concept of zero) (2). Other calendars, including those associated with the Buddhist and Hebrew traditions, register nothing unusual about the day we call 1 January 2000 or 1 January 2001, for that matter.

But for all that, the coming of a millennium, as with so many other anniversaries, is an event of enormous social, emotional, and spiritual power; its influence extends far beyond numbers on a calendar, reaching apocalyptic proportions for some. Although the exact nature of that power is obscure, it clearly springs from roots that extend deep into our biology, our psychology, our history. Our response to the coming of a millennium says as much about …