Our responsibility to society includes a respect for those arenas of life that supersede medical values. As we wield our hammers of medical technique, we ought to actively resist the temptation to see nails all around us. By virtue of our training in physiology and psychology, physicians have no more authority than do attorneys or teachers, for instance, to command society's attention in regard to the wider issues of religion or politics. If physicians wish to engage in activism or proselytizing, they ought to do so on their own time, as concerned citizens-not as doctors. A good example of the regrettable metastasis of medical authority is Physicians for Social Responsibility, a well-intentioned group whose laudable goal is reduction of threats to public health.
Nuclear weapons are one of their chief concerns.
But awareness of the danger that nuclear weapons pose to health is fairly obvious and does not require a medical degree. By virtue of their education or training, physicians are no more authorities on nuclear weapons or handguns than my grandmother or any concerned citizen. In fact, to describe nuclearization as a clinical problem is to grossly and inappropriately trivialize it. The proper place of values in medicine, and of medicine in values, is destined to remain a sticky issue. Obviously the values I am advocating entail a belief that the technology of psychiatry and medicine, while important to our understanding of human beings, has a tendency to spread into areas encompassed by ideals such as love, faith, justice and art, which are far more ancient than modern medicine and much more vital to human experience.