And now the virus has descended zum Flachland:
Quand l'université diplôme les malades
Après Paris,
l'université d'Aix-Marseille va créer une formation diplômante en santé pour
les patients qui s'impliquent autour de leur maladie.
Les patients sont devenus des acteurs de santé à part
entière. Fort de ce constat, le président de l'Université d'Aix-Marseille, le
Pr Yvon Berland, a annoncé le 14 décembre, lors du 4ème colloque Médias &
santé, la création à la rentrée 2013 d'une «Université des patients» ouverte
exclusivement aux malades chroniques.
Such are the honors of our post-Arrowsmith age, where we celebrate as heroes (or more
usually, heroines) not the physician, but the valetudinarian. (The article is accompanied by a
photograph of invalids in mortarboards.)
An American counterpart of such sensiblerie would be the cult of Henrietta Lacks, crossed with the
para-academic “credit for life experience” movement.
The broader phenomenon is nicely analyzed by Pamela Haag,
here:
*
Pour d’autres
friandises
de la confiserie
du docteur Justice,
consultez:
*
~
Superficially, the antics in Marseille and Paris might seem
heart-warming, or, at worst, just the sort of goofy things people do, like
dressing up dogs in little outfits, or electing a kitty-cat “King for a
Day”. (“For a day-y …?!%!#!”) But
like blood in the urine (an apt metonomy for this sort of glurge) it is
pathognomonic of a deeper malaise.
To cull stray citations almost at random from current
reading:
From a noted historian:
These days, my discipline and our
culture like to deny the historic
importance of individuals. … Ours
is an age of denigration. … The denial of greatness traduces experience and diminishes our collective lives.
-- Fritz Stern, Einstein’s
German World (1999), p. 250-1
A caveat against a lax misreading:
“Individuals” are
indeed central to contemporary PC-thinking; but these are essentially individuals ohne Eigenschaften, save such as they inherit
automatically by virtue of their membership in some identity-group. And crucially, these individuals are without historical importance since, across a
broad socio-political spectrum, the trend of the Zeitgeist is the denial of
history.
Likewise someone might stick at “an age of denigration”. There is also exaltation -- but of a
self-undermining kind. When the
likes of Lady Di or Lindsay Lohan can become celebrities, it makes a mockery of
any genuine achievement.
Within my lifetime, there arose in America, the practice of applying the
word genius not to rocket-scientists (or mad scientists -- our colonial
relation to the essentially European notion of genius has ever been rocky), but to, um, baseball-players,
footballers, like that. Those,
that is, of a certain cast. This --
along with the gleeful self-flagellating pouncing upon the entity bordering the
Kaap die Goeie Hoop
-- was part of the reparational self-abasement of the cowed and
right-thinking, a peace offering toward those who, truth to tell, mostly just
wanted jobs. It seemed a
quintessentially late-American moment.
Yet, what was my surprise, upon encountering this passage, in chapter 13
of the first book of Der Mann ohne
Eigenschaften (1930), referring to Austria in the years immediately
following the Great War:
Es hatte damals schon die Zeit
begonnen, wo man von Genies des Fußballrasens oder des Boxrings zu sprechen anhub.
*
Für psychologisch
tiefgreifende Krimis,
in pikanter
amerikanischer Mundart,
und christlich gesinnt,
klicken Sie bitte
hier:
*
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