Kirjahaku

This enlarged edition of Man Adapting includes a new chapter expanding Dr. Dubos’s discussion of the role of medicine in man’s adaptive processes. In 1965 he wrote at length of the biological and social problems of human adaptation, while treating the medical aspects of this problem only in passing. He believed that the goal of medicine was to help man function successfully with the particular circumstances of his environment and heredity. But despite advancements in the prevention and treatment of disease, skepticism has developed during the last two decades concerning the usefulness of modern medicine. Dr. Dubos turns here to readdress this question. Today physicians rely on sophisticated scientific knowledge, and no longer offer the traditional doctor-patient relationship which ministered to psychological as well as physical comfort. But it is this spiritual aspect of human medicine, Dr. Dubos argues, which distinguishes it from general biology, and it will retain its unique position among the sciences only if it accepts responsibility for the human aspects of life. Dr. Dubos demonstrates the complex interrelationship between man and his biological environment. He writes, “I have attempted to focus my attention on the individual human being . . . trying as best he can to meet the emergencies of the day and to prepare for the uncertainties of the future. He is Man Adapting.”

The world of things is different now from what it was half a century ago, but Rene Dubos doubts that there have been basic changes in life itself, in those attitudes and activities, needs, and yearning, that are the most important for happiness and suffering, for hope and despair the differences between humanity and animality. Sophisticated and civilized as we may be, we have retained from our distant ancestors the ability to derive profound satisfaction from the small happenings of daily life.Beast or Angel? attempts to trace the origins of needs and yearnings that have always been those of humankind everywhere and always. In this search, Dubos expresses the same concerns and uses the same words when speaking of the past, the present, or the future the reason being that the biological and psychological characteristics of humankind have remained essentially the same for at least fifty millennia.We are human to the extent that we live according to certain principles which have a human quality. This quality has emerged and continues to emerge from the choices that we make throughout our individual lives and that humankind has made from the beginning of its existence. To be human is to be able and willing to choose among the options that are offered to the human species by the natural order of things. This book examines human species, not only on the basis of the biological and psychological attributes it shares with animal species, but more by identifying its choices throughout pre-history and history.

The world of things is different now from what it was half a century ago, but Rene Dubos doubts that there have been basic changes in life itself, in those attitudes and activities, needs, and yearning, that are the most important for happiness and suffering, for hope and despair—the differences between humanity and animality. Sophisticated and civilized as we may be, we have retained from our distant ancestors the ability to derive profound satisfaction from the small happenings of daily life.Beast or Angel? attempts to trace the origins of needs and yearnings that have always been those of humankind everywhere and always. In this search, Dubos expresses the same concerns and uses the same words when speaking of the past, the present, or the future—the reason being that the biological and psychological characteristics of humankind have remained essentially the same for at least fifty millennia.We are human to the extent that we live according to certain principles which have a human quality. This quality has emerged and continues to emerge from the choices that we make throughout our individual lives and that humankind has made from the beginning of its existence. To be human is to be able and willing to choose among the options that are offered to the human species by the natural order of things. This book examines human species, not only on the basis of the biological and psychological attributes it shares with animal species, but more by identifying its choices throughout pre-history and history.