ABSTRACT
In considering the King’s Men – the community charged with care for Humptynull distress – what has happened with the fragmentation of medicine can offer a warning and a way forward for other parts of the community. The reductionist approach to parts of the whole leads to disrespect and language barriers between the King’s Men and has an impact on approaches to Humptynull health – those who care for Humpty cannot see him – or even worse, they may claim spuriously to know precisely what they are seeing when all they are seeing is a fragment. The post-positivist social sciences do, however, have the potential for ‘sociological imperialism’ when they view their perspective as the whole rather than as part of the whole. This whole person awareness enables ‘diagnosis’ – built on Greek words that mean comprehensive or thorough (Dia) and knowledge (Gnosis) – not the more limiting ‘diagnosis of disease’.
