The truth about hospitals

Johnson provides us with an in-depth explanation of his experience at a local hospital, in which he described his encounters with doctors and nurses as rather unsettling, with many of these people clearly regarding Nancy’s life-or-death situation rather nonchalantly. Perhaps this is what occurs when one deals with numerous such situations on a day-to-day basis, but some things mentioned by these people are alarming and illogical, to say the least. For instance, Johnson and his wife “asked about a referral to an oncologist. That would be premature, the surgeon told us, until we knew what kind of cancer this was. She actually said that” (Johnson 36) and had an earlier experience with a doctor in which “she had been told by her doctor that she was experiencing unusually early menopause. The sign was irregular menstrual bleeding, and I still wonder why that was not taken as a warning…” (Johnson 36).

Such experiences in a hospital are downright puzzling, and unfortunately, do not seem to be all that uncommon in society. We are often told that a visit to the doctor will solve our problems, but in reality, there are not-so-infrequent lapses in those systems. As a result, the public gains a negative perception of hospitals, and concurrently, of the sciences.

And thus, Johnson presents another method in which perception can impact societal attitudes towards the sciences. People are naturally skeptical of things that they don’t understand; that is the reason why Johnson embarked on the journey of learning everything that he possibly could about cancer and wrote this book, as he said in preface of the book. As a result, those that are not involved in the sciences come to distrust it greatly, and a fair number leave hospitals with contempt for the medical bills they are forced to pay and the treatment that does not meet their expectations; Johnson and his wife were no different. Due to this fact, public opinion is greatly able to sway societal attitudes towards the sciences, often in a negative manner.

This idea, as well as some of those that were previously examined, help to illustrate the exclusiveness of the sciences. There are a very select group of individuals that understand them and a few more that respect them, but generally speaking, those that are outside of the scientific community tend to not trust them. As a result, we see a dichotomy of attitudes towards the sciences: overwhelmingly positive for those that are members of the scientific “community,” and skeptical for those that are not considered part of that same community. It is difficult to discern which community Johnson falls in; he is clearly very educated on the subject of cancer, but that only became the case as he excavated information as a result of his wife’s diagnosis. Perhaps Johnson is best described as a person that was not a member of the scientific community prior to writing this book, but his research for the literary work has clearly brought him into that community.