AHC/WI: Dictatorship of medicine

Inspired by the thread on a psychology-based ideology, I wonder what it would look like if a comprehensive and utopian political movement grew out of the medical profession.

I can imagine this happening for several reasons: Medical students have a shared culture and values; they are literate and forward-thinking, and have often formed the vanguard of OTL political movements; medicine, if it is broadly (and perhaps loosely) construed, can provide a framework within which all human interactions and phenomena can be contained; medical expertise equates to physical power, since doctors literally have the power over life and death; highly-trained medicos are often magisterial and authoritarian, overruling ignorant or ornery patients "for their own good".

If the "medical approach" were applied to politics with sufficient vigor and ruthlessness, it could produce a totalitarian movement to rival the economic-based communism. It's just a question of adopting a different set of metaphors. Citizens would be viewed as patients. Problems would be analysed in terms of hygiene, disease, and injury. Solutions to social and political problems would proceed by analogy with medical intervention: prophylaxis, quarantine, amputation...

When, where, and how might such a system arise? I'm supposing a POD before 1900, just to make it open-ended.
 
I could see some form of ideology coming about based on medical advancement and such as the result of a group of medical personnel warning of the ned for various things for a few years before a major plague struck and killed tens of millions, but I really don't see something where-in the population in general is treated as mentioned in the OP.
 
I could see that - perhaps after a major plague, doctors are revered (in ancient/medieval times) or are considered heroes on the level of soldiers (in modern times), they become an important and enviable profession and perhaps there is a medical guild or something, an ideology based the hippocratic oath could emerge (pro-life (perhaps less likely if closer to the modern day), pacifist).
 
Why would doctors be revered after a major and destructive plague, since obviously it wouldn't have been major or destructive if they'd actually been able to stop it?:confused:
 
Might this work in a third world country like Haiti or Liberia, where you could have a very small educated class of people mostly concentrated in one profession. Combine that with a traditional tribal reverence for witch doctors.
 
Why would doctors be revered after a major and destructive plague, since obviously it wouldn't have been major or destructive if they'd actually been able to stop it?:confused:

Well, if they were warning of it very publically beforehand and the authorities openly ignored them it'd make sense.
 

katchen

Banned
Inspired by the thread on a psychology-based ideology, I wonder what it would look like if a comprehensive and utopian political movement grew out of the medical profession.

I can imagine this happening for several reasons: Medical students have a shared culture and values; they are literate and forward-thinking, and have often formed the vanguard of OTL political movements; medicine, if it is broadly (and perhaps loosely) construed, can provide a framework within which all human interactions and phenomena can be contained; medical expertise equates to physical power, since doctors literally have the power over life and death; highly-trained medicos are often magisterial and authoritarian, overruling ignorant or ornery patients "for their own good".

If the "medical approach" were applied to politics with sufficient vigor and ruthlessness, it could produce a totalitarian movement to rival the economic-based communism. It's just a question of adopting a different set of metaphors. Citizens would be viewed as patients. Problems would be analysed in terms of hygiene, disease, and injury. Solutions to social and political problems would proceed by analogy with medical intervention: prophylaxis, quarantine, amputation...

When, where, and how might such a system arise? I'm supposing a POD before 1900, just to make it open-ended.
That thread on a psychology based ideology interests me. Can you refer me to it please?
 

katchen

Banned
We came very close to a medical based totalitarianism with the Eugenics Movement from about 1900 to 1960. Not even the defeat of the Nazis discredited it completely.
 
Eugenics is probably the closest real-world example, but in that case the medical profession was not the government itself, but merely a tool wielded by a government that was still basically nationalistic and tribal. My idea is to subordinate society entirely to medical hierarchies, medical methods, etc. The state is a macrocosm of a hospital.

Caduceus Wild looks like a very good illustration of what I'm talking about, though I'd prefer something a bit more low-tech, a bit less dystopian, and connected historically to real events in OTL.

For some reason I imagine the Great War as the POD, and Switzerland as the epicenter. Perhaps invest the Red Cross with messianic vision and Bolshevik ruthlessness...
 
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