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The Theology of Medicine: The Political-Philosophical Foundation of Medical Ethics

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In one of his recent interviews, when asked to summarize his legacy, Dr. Szasz stated: "Responsibility is more important than Liberty, and Liberty is more important than Health". The Theology of Medicine expands and clarifies this position in a very illuminating way.

The book is a collection of relatively short essays. You can read each one of them in less than an hour, but you will probably need at least as much time to think about what you read. Dr. Szasz' writing is lucid and intellectually stimulating. I re-read this book very recently with as much pleasure as I received when I first read it several years ago.

No discussion on medical ethics should be considered complete without this clear and powerful expression of Dr. Thomas Szasz' ideas. Although written more than twenty years ago, this book, unfortunately, is becoming only more relevant with the passage of time.
I would advise everyone in the medical profession to become familiar with this book - you may not agree with everything, but it will make you think about some fundamental ethical assumptions you may be taking for granted.

Thomas Szasz (born 1920) is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center. He is a well-known critic of psychiatry, of the social role of medicine in modern society, and is a social libertarian.

Szasz states in the Preface to the First (1977) Edition, "This book is a collection of essays most of which have appeared previously. Many of them, however, were prepared for lectures and were subsequently published in a shorter version than the original text from which they were excerpted." He adds in the 1987 Preface to the Second Edition, "The essays assembled in this volume reflect my long-standing interest in moral philosophy and my conviction that the idea of a medical ethics as something distinct and separate from ethics is an absurdity."

Here are some representative quotations from the book:

"I favor free trade in drugs for the same reason the Founding Fathers favored free trade in ideas: in an open society, it is none of the government's business what idea a man puts into his mind; likewise, it should be none of the government's business what drug he puts into his body."
"My point ... is that so-called mental patients do not talk gibberish. To be sure, sometimes they talk differently than others do ... perhaps in accents and metaphors that we do not understand or, if we understand them, that we do not like."
"(T)he idea that licensing doctors protects the public is one of the most uncritically accepted falsehoods of our day."
"I am not an anarchist, though, as you know, that ideology exercises a certain charm for many libertarians. I consider anarchism unrealistic, impractical."