HW Week 10
John Ruffin, former head of the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities wrote:
"The 19th-century scientist and pathologist Rudolph Virchow gave voice to many of our present-day concerns about disparities and went a long way toward defining the task before us. A socially minded man, he believed that science should speak the language of the common people and that medicine should serve the public's health. He wrote, 'If medicine is to fulfill her greatest task, then she must enter the political and social life…'"
Do you agree and why? Is it permissible for scientists to become advocates in the areas of their research? What steps can one take to balance advocacy with the objectivity that is considered the ideal in scientific inquiry?
The practice of medicine is inherently social, in my opinion. The history of the concept of objectivity, itself, teaches us that objectivity and subjectivity were always part and parcel-you cannot have the concept of one without the other. However, the idea of what subjectivity and objectivity mean, as concepts themselves, has changed over time. In a historical analysis of atlases, Daston and Galison outline that the concept of objectivity as we think about it today, only emerges as an epistemic value –or a value in the process of making knowledge—in the mid-19th century. This kind of “mechanical objectivity” is what we think of today as a “view from nowhere” or some kind of technological perspective like that of a camera, or an image from an xray or CT, that could provide an account that removed the failing subjectivity of the creator. Prior to the advent of the photograph, this notion did not exist. Instead, the 18th century actually celebrated a kind of ideal of objectivity that Galison and Daston call “truth-to-nature” or the ability of an illustrator to bring out the fundamental uniformity of nature that was concealed beneath the diversity of objects in nature. So, in other words, the fundamental ideal was for an illustrator/scientist to be able to see beyond individual differences to bring out a commonality and uniformity of shape, kind, etc., of the objects that were being viewed. This meant erasing individual differences and focusing on fundamental commonalities and required a kind of subjectivity of the viewer. The scientific persona, or “self” of the scientist had to be cultivated in a particular way in order to produce particular kinds of knowledge. It was with the arrival of photography that the new kind of scientific image could be created which removed the notion of a subjectivity. This notion of “mechanical objectivity”—the idea that we can even have knowledge without the subjectivity of scientist/knowledge-maker has followed us into the 21st century. Given that objectivity itself has a history, and that scientists have had to cultivate different kinds of relationships to their objects of knowledge, tells us that the ideal kind of scientific practice cannot be one in which the social is somehow removed. Our lens upon which we parcel up the world and we create knowledge is inherently social. We are doing a disservice when we don’t acknowledge that because then we fall prey to losing perspective and pretending that there ever was knowledge outside of how we have approached our objects of inquiry. That being said, I am not a proponent of relativism and there are facts in the world. We agree to them, such as a table being hard and the atoms in the table so tightly packed that they create the experience of “hardness”. Those atoms exist. But, our inquiry into them has everything to do with what we what to do with the table, and the people that we invite around the table and how we do and do not listen to those people at the table about the next questions to ask about that table. This is a long metaphor to say that a democratic scientific practice with as many people together recognizing their biases and openly talking about where and how they approach their inquiry is, in my opinion, the best way to work together to try to create a world which reflects the values that we hope to inspire in the world.