ABSTRACT

Let us imagine how a modern university hospital might look to anthropologists from Mars studying healing shrines in an industrialized society. They would learn that the local medical school is reputed to be a site of amazing cures … certain areas were open to the public and other areas … were reserved exclusively for the performance of arcane healing rituals … . These special-purpose rooms contain spectacular machines … . Those who tend and control these machines speak a special language that is unintelligible to the layperson and prominently display on their person healing amulets and charms … . The operating rooms are the holy of holies … . So jealously guarded are the mysteries of the operating room that patients are rendered unconscious before they are allowed to enter them.