Introduction

In this introduction some reflections on modern medicine are presented. The leitmotiv of the various contributions is the focus on the dimensions of "cure" and "care". The first describes the elimination of the cause of a disease from an exclusively technical point of view, in this (biomedical) model the traditional doctor-patient relationship - in which the one who cures does not just cure but, by combining the clinical dimension to that of an anthropological nature, "takes care", in the wider sense, of whom is not well - is transformed into an encounter between therapist and disease, understood in the purely biological sense of the word. The second concerns a combination of informal procedures of assistance based on elements such as attention, encouragement, support, compassion and, first of all, the personal involvement of the person administering the treatment with the person who is suffering (bio-psycho-social model). Curing and caring are medical practices by definition, but the two concepts have not always gone hand-in-hand. Often they have been considered as two mutually exclusive terms and therefore alternatively connected to different social actors. Nursing and medicine have been seen, and in many ways still are, as two classical examples of professions with opposite attitudes towards caring and curing. Drawing on researches carried out in Italy, Russia and Usa, and on a interdisciplinary approach fostered by the participation to the making of this journal, at the same time, of authors such as sociologists, anthropologist, social workers, pedagogists, physicians, psychiatrists and psycologists, this issue of “Medicina nei secoli” tries to show that the difference of professions is not the only variable involved in shaping caring and curing attitudes. Other variables are concerned. Race, gender, projects of professionalization, different kinds of sickness, social and political changes, national peculiarities, all of them work together to complicate the unilateral occupational expectations. Cure, today, perhaps cannot exist without care and there are not so specific and clear cut distinctions anymore.