therapeutic interventions have
two faces: one is to heal the sick, the other is to control the wicked.
Since sickness is often considered to be a form of wickedness, and
wickedness a form of sickness, contemporary medical practices—in
all countries regardless of their political makeup—often consist of
complicated combinations of treatment and social control. The
temptation to embrace all medical interventions as forms of therapy,
or to reject them all as forms of social control, must be firmly
resisted. It behooves us, instead, to discriminate intelligently and to
describe honestly the things doctors do to cure the sick and the
things they do to control the deviant.