Abstract
On the occasion of Dr. Herbert Ratner's 90th birthday in May, 1997, the conversation among his many assembled friends and admirers inevitably moved to the necessity of preserving the legacy of this remarkable man. Although Dr. Ratner was an inveterate writer and an acclaimed and sought-after speaker, his versatility had been the undoing of several attempts to collect his works into a single volume. Although Herb Ratner's disciples were legion and most were characterized by an adoption of his world view in whole or part, there was no one truly duplicating the uniqueness of his literary achievement. There followed from that festive evening a resolve on the part of his medical colleagues in the Chicago Catholic Physicians’ Guild to undertake the assembling and publication of the collected works of Dr. Herbert Ratner as Nature, The Physician, and The Family.
In these 235 pages there is a timeless resource aimed primarily at the medical profession but a wisdom and a sensibility to nature as God's handmaiden which bridges many professions and cultures.
Herb Ratner's personal odyssey is a fascinating progression from a liberal New York Jewish background (His family's position on the political spectrum can best be discerned by Herb's boast that his mother had dated Trotsky before marrying). In medical school, he met and married Dorothy Smith, his classmate who eventually led him to the Church. At the University of Chicago, he was part of a group including the charismatic philosopher Herbert Schwartz, psychiatrist Kenneth Simon (now Father Raphael, a Trappist monk) and Winston Ashley (now Father Benedict Ashley, O.P.) who made giant leaps of faith to be converted to the Catholic Church. His biological-philosophical writings attracted the attention of Robert Maynard Hutchins, the esteemed president of the University of Chicago who appointed him a senior member of the Committee on Liberal Arts which prepared the original Great Books curriculum.
It was as Student Health Director and a member of the Public Health faculty at Loyola Medical School that his radical and challenging and totally Christian approach to the profession of medicine began to be formulated and passed on to succeeding generations of medical students. The two models held up to the students were the revered founder of the art of medicine, Hippocrates, and St. Luke, the beloved physician who completed Hippocrates with the Christian vision in the way that grace perfects nature.
Ratner's esteem for Hippocrates not only in the Oath but the wisdom of the entire corpus of his work forms a large part of the writings included in Nature, The Physician, and The Family. Some of the medical power structure is now reluctantly rediscovering the principles of Hippocrates which remain timely 2,500 years after they were written. Dr. Ratner's approach to the practice of medicine as an art and not a science is likewise timely in the current depersonalized and technology-driven medical scene. In the Ratnerian view, it is nature who heals, not the physician and it is the primary role of the physician “to do for nature what she would do if she were able.”
The lead article in this book is the famous interview of Ratner by Donald McDonald. This interview, a question and answer format, is one of the most provocative and insightful global views of the place and purpose of medical care ever published. It is a classic which demonstrates the brilliant and unique approach of Dr. Herbert Ratner to the philosophy of medicine.
Ratner was not merely an armchair philosopher, however, and his numerous scientific achievements as the Public Health Director of Oak Park, Illinois are also substantiated in his writings. His courageous stands against the conventional wisdom of the medical establishment are legendary. As Public Health Director, he declined to allow the new, highly-publicized Salk vaccine to be administered in Oak Park. He was dramatically vindicated by the subsequent occurrence of multiple vaccine-induced cases of polio which led to sweeping changes in the preparation and subsequent safety of the vaccine. He was also one of the first to recognized the dangers of the contamination of the vaccine by Simian virus 40, a virus now being linked to the occurrence of certain neoplasms in later life.
He was also an early and persistent critic of the safety of the contraceptive pill. The thromboembolic complications of the pill have led to sharp reductions in the estrogen component of the pill which tacitly recognize the legitimacy of his critique. He also confronted the numerous theologian apologists for the pill who led the dissent from Humanae Vitae.
He was an early and eloquent defender of the sanctity of human life and provided much of the early impetus to the Pro-Life movement, particularly in articulating the resistance to converting medicine into a killing profession. His articles entitled “Condoms and Aids” and “Semen and Aids” show that he remained au courant and influential in his approaches to the huge public health challenge posed by the epidemiology of HIV infection.
Even those of us who have been familiar with the writings of Herb Ratner and who chose him as our mentor are nevertheless overwhelmed by the impact of the diversity of this book and the probity and clarity of his style. Those meeting the Ratner philosophy for the first time will be convinced that this was truly a Renaissance Man, both as a Christian and a scientist.
Dr. Ratner worked with me as the editor of Nature, The Physician, and The Family and approved and selected every article included in the volume. On December 4, 1997, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died suddenly. It was extremely fortuitous that we were able to preserve the wisdom of this truly remarkable man in a format of his choosing. Nature, The Physician, and The Family deserves a place on every short shelf of modern medical classics.