RT Book, Section
A1 Marchesi, Ilaria
A2 Molmenti, Ernesto Pompeo
A2 Santibañes, Martin de
A2 Santibañes, Eduardo de
SR Print(0)
ID 1180107004
T1 The Liver in Mythology and History
T2 Liver Transplantation: Operative Techniques and Medical Management
YR 2021
FD 2021
PB McGraw Hill
PP New York, NY
SN 9781260462517
LK accesssurgery.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?aid=1180107004
RD 2024/04/19
AB Words  embody  a  worldview.  They  are  the  way  in  which  different  cultures  at  different  times  understand,  describe,  and  relate  to  reality.  Today,  medicine  organizes  reality  through  a  scientific  language,  a  discourse  in  which  words  have  a  special  relation  to  things:  they  indicate  objects  as  part  of  a  controlled  and  agreed-upon  nomenclature,  or  they  refer  to  similarly  controlled  and  agreed-upon  definitions.  The  language  of  science  is  a  language  that  has  the  present  as  its  essential  horizon.  It  is  designed  to  be  clear  and  univocal,  to  function  as  a  tool  for  the  production  and  sharing  of  information  about  the  world  to  which  we  have  access  in  the  present—of  which  we  can,  that  is,  have  experimental  knowledge.  Scientific  language  works  well  for  that  purpose.  A  fibula,  for  instance,  is  “the  outer  or  postaxial  and  usually  the  smaller  of  the  two  bones  of  the  hind  or  lower  limb  below  the  knee”  and  nothing  else;  just  as  by  digestion  we  mean  “the  process  of  making  food  absorbable  by  mechanically  and  enzymatically  breaking  it  down  into  simpler  chemical  compounds  in  the  alimentary  canal”  (both  definitions  are  extracted  from  the  Merriam-Webster  Medical  Dictionary,  s.v.).  Words,  however,  may  be  useful  to  approach  worldviews  that  are  distant  from  the  here  and  now  but  with  which  we  may  want  to  establish  a  relation.  These  different  ways  of  understanding  reality  may  no  longer  be  active,  or  they  may  be  alternatives  to  the  ones  we  hold  and  practice,  and  our  relation  to  them  would  depend  either  on  our  claiming  a  historical  connection  (they  are  the  ways  in  which  people  before  us  understood  reality)  or  multifocal  interest  (they  are  the  ways  in  which  other  cultures  understand  the  world).  In  both  cases,  again,  we  have  words  to  rely  upon  to  establish  that  connection  and  pursue  that  interest.