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Medicine is a person`´ s name

Not until the 20^th century when from the hand of certain totalitarian ideologies, the concept man and the concept person did not describe the same thing. From the moment in which not all men were people, with the same rights, there is no right to hope for the same treatment for everyone. The consequences of creating this distinction have been terrible for humanity, ever since some appointed themselves judges of others, and removed the privilege of being a person from certain men. The life of any person deserves to be lived, but not that of any man, say these new thinkers. The anti-humanists insistently repeat that not all men should receive the privileges that life brings. Unfortunately Medicine has also been contaminated with this belief system which does not give all men the status of person. Not all men deserve the same respect, the same care, the same attention and the same effort. Medicine had been depersonalised and as such had become less human.

We need to go back to common sense, to sanity, to see all men as people. In the middle of  a forest of ideas that blocks the light from penetrating to the floor, I want to re-state the radical conviction from history that all men are people.

Under the umbrella of Bioethics, vicious attacks have been launched against man, changing him into something unrecognizable for common people. “Not all humans are people” says the American thinker H. Tristram Engelhardt, quite unashamedly. From his perspective humanity can be split into two irreconcilable groups, incompatible, unknown and distinct as if they were antagonistic enemies: men and people. How do we differentiate them? The new test is as follows: it is necessary to be conscious, or better, self-conscious, in order to be people, but if not, the bioethicist can downgrade us to the condition of only biological life, stripped of our innate rights.

When we define a person as a self-conscious man, with capacity for judgement, mature reasoning, conscious of his own self, with the freedom and autonomy to choose freely, we divide humanity into two groups as we saw earlier. On one side are the unblemished people who do not need anything and maintain their own autonomy and consciousness, and on the other are those men who, since birth or, perhaps having been injured at some point in their lives, are not autonomous and in many cases are not conscious. This current has gained so many followers that it now exercises a hegemony in many universities and different centres of bioethics. One of its most famed defenders is

Professor Peter Singer, who intends to formulate a new Medical Ethics, where sometimes the unjustifiable finds philosophical backing. According to his new conception, the lesser man only deserves oblivion, or contempt, as a being to protect. Societies have always been identified as mature and exemplary depending on how they treat their most vulnerable and disfavoured. These new thinkers break with this tradition and dare to position themselves in the realms of totalitarian conceptions of life. The sad thing about all this is, the excessive echo that these discriminatory and unjust ideas create. To deny some men the right to be considered people is an egregious error. To recognise a person is to recognise an absolute demand, an unconditional, inalienable right. Medicine is the name of a person if we don’t establish differences between men and people. If we commit the error of doing so, we forget its first principle, which is that of attending to the person. The great German philosopher Spaemann simply says that all men are people, in the following way “the person is the man, not a quality of man”. Let us abandon the academic position of asking the conscience of a judge to decide whether a man is a person.

Likewise the Spanish thinker Julian Marias believes that the human being is not any old thing, something with thousands of examples, but someone unrepeatable, or expressed in these words: “ the person is a corporeal someone”

We should support the song of reconciliation of man with his personal being, in order not to follow the unjust and dangerous road of differentiating man and person, that strangles the development of Medicine. By luck man has qualities in his being that bring him to be called a person, but the being called this way, is not any of its characteristics, but the human carrier that has them.

Humanist Based Care believes in man as a personal being, who deserves all the discoveries of humanity and its efforts and discoveries.

Finally I would like to agree with the Spanish philosopher Jose Luis del Barco, who sees it as imperative that we correct this insanity of not recognizing as people all men. “Every person is unique, singular and extraordinary, like an individual event that has never existed before and will never be repeated, that the being that we each have, this irreducible being of whosoever in the world, perhaps impeded and weak or with fewer talents, perhaps powerful, athletic, strong and intelligent; that the person is not any characteristic of the essence, gift of nature or quality that this has, but the being of anyone who has these ornaments has repeated without ceasing actively or passively, like the interminable beating of a hammer on the blacksmith’s anvil, although today has been forgotten by the empty prestige of idealist thought that reduces consciousness, a fool’s gold prestige of tinsel like the sheen of fame rooted in a lie”