166 chapter
above. Also, the Oxford English Dictionary in its fi rst entry for “cure” gives the
defi nition “To take care of; to care for, regard”, a now defunct usage^3 which
nevertheless evokes the overlap between process and fi nal disposition, or care
and cure, I observed in Kerala.
Th is original meaning of “cure” is invoked by historians of biomedicine who
claim that a division arose in the past between eff orts to take care of the ill (make
them feel better) and cure the patient (remove the disease entity). Kothari and
Mehta warn against the tendency in “modern medicine” ( allopathy/ biomedicine)
to utilize invasive procedures to remove any abnormality and other instances of
what they see as violence in medical practice. Th ey suggest that healers should
focus on easing dis-ease (the pain in suff ering) and thereby return medicine to
the original meaning of “cure,” which was “to take care:”
Th e idea that the chief role of a medical system is to take care of the dis-eased
gives the system only a palliative role. Th is is as it should be. Oliver Wendell
Holmes has described his teacher, Dr. Jackson, as one who never talked of curing
his patients “except in its true etymological sense of taking care of him.”...Modern medicine is in need of humility; it must give back to “cure” its etymo-
logical meaning. It must recognize that with a concerned physician around, no
disease, no death, is incurable. A drug to ease, a procedure to palliate, a word of
cheer, the graceful stoicism to hold the dying patient’s hand—all this and more
falls within the curative competence of a compassionate clinician (1988: 197).Th is proposal diff ers from the present status of palliative care in allopathic
medicine. “Palliative” is defi ned as “a term applied to the treatment of incurable
diseases, in which the aim is to mitigate the suff erings of the patient, not to eff ect
a cure” (Black’s Medical Dictionary 1992: 434), and palliative care focuses on ter-
minally ill patients and hospice care (Doyle et al. 1998). Palliative medicine thus
refers to attempts to relieve suff ering after the possibility of cure has passed—
although Chapple (forthcoming) observes that even palliative care can, at times,
be end-oriented, dominated by the clock time of the hospital, and hurried.
Th ere are, however, cases in which defi nitions of cure are more nuanced in
contemporary biomedicine. An example of this can be seen in the treatment
of cancer. Knowing that complete eradication is hard to determine, success in
cancer treatment is measured in fi ve year survival rates. Also, in advanced cases
of cancer, doctors try to weigh the benefi ts of abrasive therapies against the
patient’s “quality of life,” the degree of mental and psychological suff ering he/
she is undergoing.^4 More pertinent to this study, schizophrenia is often consid-
ered to be a chronic problem “characterized by remissions and relapses,” and a
variety of outcomes, such as “occupational functioning and social competence,”