Dear Jeyamohan,
One of my friends sent me your speech on the importance of philosophy in our thoughts of history and literature. I am a medical doctor, and I feel that philosophy is essential for medical practitioners, too. Without philosophy, you cannot understand medicine in the real sense. A surgeon without a philosophical base is just a mechanic or plumber.
Essentially, medical science grapples with two fundamental philosophical concerns: life (and its opposite, death) and health. If you ask a medical doctor what his personal definition is for these two terms, generally 99 percent of them will be perplexed and run away. In our medical colleges, we focus on teaching the technical aspects of anatomy and medicine, rather than the philosophical underpinnings.
This is the case in every field of knowledge in Tamil Nadu. No wonder your talk has a very poor audience while a humbug like ‘healer’ Bhaskar has millions of hits.
Dr. S. Prabhakar
