Applications of Synchrotron Radiation Micro Beams in Cell Micro Biology and Medicine Book

Overall, I found this book a bit confusing, jumping from topic to topic in a kind of manic fury.

Szasz argues, throughout, that the mind must be distinguished from the brain. The brain can be diseased but the mind cannot. While I agree that the mind is not identical with the brain, Szasz does not seem to acknowledge that all diseases, even those of the body and brain, are diseases within a certain social context, a context, for example, that values a healthy body and longevity (most, if not all societies). Something similar, I believe, can be said about mental illnesses. While mental illnesses seem to correlate with certain anomolous brain structures, we generally only hold such anomalies to be problematic if the correlating behavior is also problematic. We don't, for example, say today that the brains of left-handed individuals are ill or diseased because we don't pathlogize the corresponding behavior - left-handedness. Something similar, I think, can be said about schizophrenia - we only take the corresponding brain structures, such as enlarged ventricles, to be indicators of illness because we take, as a society, schizophrenia to be an illness.

This is all to say that I don't think Szasz goes far enough in identifying the social context of diseases.

Finally, I want to quote, at length, Szasz's criticism of reductionism which, I think, is well put:

I dare say there is something bizarre about the materialist-reductionist's denial of persons. To be sure, brains in craniums exist; and so do persons in societies. The material substrates of a human being - a person - are organs, tissues, cells, molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles. The material substrates of a human artifact - say a wedding ring - are crystals, atoms, electrons in orbits, and so forth. Scientists do not claim to be able to explain the economic or emotional value of a wedding ring by identifying its material composition; nor do they insist that a physicalistic account of its structure is superior to a cultural and personal account of its meaning. Yet, many scientists, from physicists to neurophysiologists, claim that they can explain choice and responsibility by identifying its material substrate. . . . Indeed, in recent decades the canons of respectable scholarship and respectable jouralism alike have virtually mandated that we view only biological-reductionist explanations of human bevaior as scientific. (140)