Nowadays, if you are sick you are no longer at the mercy of a natural process that is barely controllable and understood even less. From a theoretical point of view, the mechanisms at work within an afflicted organism have been quite well studied — and continue to be researched with considerable effort and some success. In practice, too, care for the sick has been organized pretty much across the board, at least in most countries. The state attends to both aspects, medical science and an effective healthcare system. It takes up its citizens’ fundamental interest in being cared for, assisted, and recovering when sick, for it is just as concerned as they are that they be fit for everyday bourgeois life and, in particular, for a proper working life. After all, it wants the conditions under which a people sustain it and themselves to be coped with in a productive way. Public health is an essential prerequisite for that, and therefore recognized as an important state responsibility.

However, there is another reason why the individual experience of getting sick cannot simply be written off as a natural process in today’s world. While it is true that in such a case one’s physical constitution is generally under attack (often enough along with one’s psyche, which is far from purely natural), the “attacker” in the modern world is usually not nature as such, or at least not nature alone. Nowadays, the main stresses on body and soul that people have to take — and often enough cannot take — are those imposed by the society in which they have to be so interested in being fit for life, specifically working life, and their state is therefore interested in having a healthcare system. Modern medicine has pushed back much of what “nature” once did to people in terms of disease, epidemics, and infirmity (though even then, it was not just nature alone, the nature of social relations was also already a decisive factor). But in the centers of social progress, medicine is all the busier dealing with the direct and indirect consequences of a quite unnatural way of taxing people’s natural constitutions. These pressures could, in turn, for the most part hardly be endured so steadfastly without constant medical care, finally reaching the “full-blown picture” of “modern plagues.”

Thus, the modern healthcare system has a very special usefulness — indeed, it is indispensable— to a social system whose pressures generate most of the ailments the system has to see to. Its functionality for the “prevailing order” is significantly bolstered by the fact that while the professionals engaged in the field both practically and theoretically do recognize such a link between social cause and physiological or psychological effect and include it in their diagnoses and therapeutic approaches (after all, they are “dealing with people,” not cell cultures), they are only interested in the stressful social exigencies afflicting their patients insofar as science shows statistically significant correlations which they can translate into practical advice for a “healthier lifestyle.” And there is another way the medical sector goes well with the politically managed economic system that gives it so much to do and to research: it itself is a massive business and, as such, an integral component of capital growth in a modern economy.

© GegenStandpunkt 2026