It is probably a universal teaching of all cultures that putting a name to a demon helps to decrease its fearsomeness. I sometimes wonder whether the real, perhaps culturally subconscious, reason that medical pioneers have always sought to identify and classify specific diseases is less to understand than to beard them. Confrontation, somehow, is safer once we have set a label on a thing, as if the very process makes the beast sit still for a while and appear susceptible to taming; it puts under some element of control what has previously been a wilderness of unrestrained terror. When we give sickness a name, we civilize it-we make it play the game by our own rules. Naming a disease is the first step in organizing against it."
( Sherwin B. Nuland )
[ How We Die: Reflections of ]
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