ABSTRACT
142This paper will look at the diagnosis and treatment of diabetes as a medical system within the wider medical system of orthodox Western medicine. I will attempt to examine the thinking behind the practice, and to show why the treatment can be viewed partly as a magical ritual. My starting-points are the presuppositional, analogical and circular nature of much scientific thought, and the rationality, within limits, of magical thought (see Bibliography). Important theoretical considerations are Horton’s argument that the crucial difference between traditional and scientific thinking is that the traditional thinker is unable even to imagine possible alternatives to his established theories; and the suggestions of writers such as Kuhn and Polanyi that scientific thinkers, though they may admit alternatives, may nonetheless have a protective attitude towards established theory. Such protectiveness recalls Evans-Pritchard’s discussion of the ‘secondary elaboration’ of the Azande in the face of the failure of their magic.
