Documents / FOIA release
This is a CIA JPRS translation, dated 1 January 1991, of an editorial roundtable written up by V.I. Shamshurin for the Moscow journal Sotsiologicheskiye Issledovaniya. Soviet scientists, physicians and philosophers discuss medicine and biology as sociohumanitarian sciences and the links between the natural and social sciences. One participant says public interest in parapsychology, UFOs and astrology reflects a human need for miracles during social crisis. He also criticizes parapsychology experiments and Uri Geller's performances.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
## Document 8 of 10
achieve at the given moment, ones more desired than urgent. This is proper but not the one needed now. Our aphorism is ''physician, cure thyself.' It has a concrete appeal and offers clear practical guidance. In the mouth of any patient, it can be a direct demand and a ''verb in the imperative'' and moreover has the character of direct completed action.
21. What sort of art can you have, he [the patient] might say, if you yourself are not healthy and look bad; I will not come to you for treatment. Such an understanding in medicine of one's own purpose has come down from the times of Hippocrates who said that a physician should look decent in order to extol his ability by his appearance.
22. V.I. Shamshurin: Plato in this sense makes a very accurate comment: Certainly in my opinion they treat the body not with the body, otherwise it would be inadmissible to have a poor corporeal state of the physician himself, rather they treat the body with the soul, and the soul cannot treat well if the physician's is poor or has become such.' Why do I recall Plato? He, in my view, provides the most surprising correlation between medicine and the sciences dealing with society. Thus, in one of his sociopolitical works, 'The Republic' in comparing medicine and legal art, he legitimizes them only under the condition that 'both of them are concerned for the citizens viable both in terms of body and soul...' ('The Republic,' 410).
23. A.S. Ivanov: That is precisely the point. I constantly take instantaneous decisions in operations and I bear an enormous burden of responsibility-both moral and, incidentally, legal. On this level, precisely from the legal viewpoint, philosophers and sociologists in their activities are not involved in the law. I have never heard that they had responsibility stipulated precisely by the law and not by arbitrariness (since there has been more than enough persecution of the social scientists) for socioideological recommendations that have been ineffective or even lethal for society. Physicians treat both the body and the soul. And here I am a member of the humanities. Incidentally, I, as a cardiologist, am extremely close to the philosophical principle that "'truth passes through the heart'" which is rather well known and is inherent to the ancient philosophical cultural tradition which bears a name similar to the name of my profession, crypto- or cardiognosis. Hippocrates put it clearly: "'The physician-philosopher is like God.'" Let us recall again the classic Russian literature of the 19th Century. Prince V.F. Odoyevskiy in his "'The Story of the Cock, Cat and Frog'" very precisely examines the role of psychoanalysis in the treatment of hypochondriacs. And this is from the viewpoint of surgery! At present, unfortunately, an analysis of the inner motives of man is applied basically in psychotherapy and sex pathology. Not linked to a story yet.
FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 13 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.