Functional and Organic

Excerpt

To the editor: Doctor Lipkin has made a significant contribution to medical education with his essay "Functional or Organic? A Pointless Question" which appeared in the November issue of the ANNALS.

We are deeply immersed in the implications of the Cartesian mind-body dualism which has made a rigorously mechanistic approach to physiological phenomena possible on the one hand but has saddled us with the image of man as a "ghost in a machine" on the other. We have become biological mechanics. If we cannot tinker with the machine, we scorn and resent the mischievious ghost. How many patients have learned