Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/06580_Field_TCUM T145.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 1KB | 16 lines

Perhaps the most interesting point about this anecdote is that
it appeals to a modern physicist. It would not have appealed to
Newton or to Adam Smith, for they were great experts and
advocates of the fragmentary and the specialist approaches. It
is by means quite in accord with the outlook of the Chinese
sage that Hans Selye works at his “stress” idea of illness. In the
l920s he had been baffled at why physicians always seemed to
concentrate on the recognition of individual diseases and
specific remedies for such isolated causes, while never paying
any attention to the “syndrome of just being sick.” Those who
are concerned with the program “content” of media and not
with the medium proper, appear to be in the position of
physicians who ignore the “syndrome of just being sick.” Hans
Selye, in tackling a total, inclusive approach to the field of
sickness, began what Adolphe Jonas has continued in Irritation
and Counter-Irritation ; namely, a quest for the response to