Every once in a while you hear of unusually creative friendships. Such friendships have the dual effect on my consciousness of restoring my faith in humanity and sparking my imagination relative to our collective future. I stumbled across a lovely passage which describes one such friendship between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in Robert D. Richardon’s Emerson: The Mind on Fire:

A visitor in 1852 named John Albee has left the fullest description of how Emerson and Thoreau got along together in public. Thoreau was already at Emerson’s when Albee arrived. “He was much at home with Emerson: and as he remained through the afternoon and evening, and I left him still at the fire side, he appeared to me to belong in some way to the household.” Emerson continually deferred to Thoreau, Albee recalled, “and seemed to anticipate his views, preparing himself obviously for a quiet laugh at Thoreau’s negative and biting criticism, especially in regard to education and educational institutions.” Albee had come to find out how to get the best kind of education.

Emerson pleaded always for the college; said he himself had entered at fourteen. This aroused the wrath of Thoreau, who would not allow any good to the college course. And here it seemed to me Emerson said things on purpose to draw Thoreau’s fire and to amuse himself. When the curriculum at Cambridge was alluded to, and Emerson casually remarked that most of the branches of learning were taught there, Thoreau seized one of his opportunities and replied “Yes indeed, all the branches and none of the roots.” At this Emerson laughed heartily… in the evening Thoreau devoted himself wholly to the children and the parching of corn by the open fire.

If the friendship provided kindling for the fires of my imagination, Thoreau’s comment was the spark for this upcoming series of posts on the subjects of medicine, art and philosophy. Having worked in the field of medicine for the last twenty years or so, I must say that medicine, like any science provides endless opportunity for exploration and consideration. The branches of medicine are becoming increasingly well-defined and as such are more differentiated from one another than ever before, but I have to wonder if our obsession with the branches has left us out on a limb, metaphorically-speaking, to the point that we’ve forgotten about the roots which support the whole structure.

All systems of medicine are concerned with restoring health at the physical, mental or emotional level, or some combination of the three. The design and interactions of these three levels is incredibly complex and despite our progress in mapping out its various components and their inter-relationships, the unknown significantly outweighs unknown. Our various parts are animated by forces biological, mechanical, chemical and energetic and as a result, the science of medicine is necessarily multi-disciplinary, including but not limited to sciences such as biology, chemistry, biochemistry, anatomy, physiology, physics and more.

More to come…