Doctors into Agents : The Technologies of Medical Knowledge and Social Control in State Socialist Hungary

In this paper, I analyze different situations in which the doctor-patient relationship, the knowledge/information produced within this framework, and the practices of medical questioning came to the fore in the work of the state security services, one of the typical institutions of social observation and surveillance of the Hungarian socialist state. I examine work and recruitment dossiers opened from 1956 to the 1980s which document either physicians’ uses in state security observation of information which they gained about their patients during their professional (medical) activities in or in which the physician-patient relationship appears as a context of the physician’s recruitment. I discuss how physicians constructed the patient when the gaze of the state security forces was also arguably part of their medical gaze. I contend that medical knowledge and, more generally, information revealed in the professional (medical) context and used in the framework of network surveillance, taken out of their strict medical context, constituted a gray zone of power. On the one hand, this information was a useful tool with which the regime could exert some measure of effective social and political control beyond the borders of healthcare, while on the other hand, it could help physicians develop a certain degree of social resistance.

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Recta Ratio Agibilium in a medical context: the role of virtue in the physician-patient relationship

Philosophy Ethics and Humanities in Medicine ◽

10.1186/s13010-018-0062-3 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 13 (1) ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Helena M. Olivieri

Keyword(s):

Patient Relationship ◽

Physician Patient Relationship ◽

Medical Context ◽

Physician Patient

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The physician's disease: The impact of medical knowledge on personal illness

Palliative & Supportive Care ◽

10.1017/s1478951507070095 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 5 (1) ◽

pp. 71-76 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

JEFFREY P. TUTTLE

Keyword(s):

Treatment Plan ◽

Medical Knowledge ◽

Sick Role ◽

Patient Relationship ◽

Physician Patient Relationship ◽

Consultation Room ◽

Patients Experience ◽

Physician Patient ◽

The Impact

Objective: When physicians confront a personal illness of a serious nature, they may discover that the transition to the sick role is challenging, and the inability to relinquish their stethoscope may cause undo anxiety. The physician–patient relationship is intrinsically asymmetrical, and the role of the physician is to regulate the amount of information patients need in order to become educated about their illness and to make informed decisions about their treatment plan. This article explores the challenges in the physician–patient relationship when the patient is also a physician.Methods: This article is a literature review of publications involving the unique challenges physician–patients experience when suffering from serious personal illness.Results: The medical knowledge physician–patients harbor has the potential to complicate their ability to cope with difficult or terminal diagnoses. Paradoxically, knowledge about a condition may fuel anxiety instead of alleviating the fear associated with the unknown. Medical knowledge therefore may entail a certain loss of innocence, and physicians are often unable to revert to being “mere” patients. Furthermore, managing this anxiety in physician–patients may prove to be challenging to the treating physician.Significance of results: From a medical perspective, physician–patients need to be addressed like any other patient. Psychologically, however, these patients are unique, and the specific challenges their education and experience bring into the consultation room needs to be explicitly addressed.

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Physician-patient relationship and the state

JAMA ◽

10.1001/jama.216.12.2017b ◽

1971 ◽

Vol 216 (12) ◽

pp. 2017b-2017

Author(s):

G. L. Campbell

Keyword(s):

The State ◽

Patient Relationship ◽

Physician Patient Relationship ◽

Physician Patient

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Must Physicians Reveal Their Wounds?

Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics ◽

10.1017/s0963180100006940 ◽

1996 ◽

Vol 5 (2) ◽

pp. 204-213 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Barry R. Furrow

Keyword(s):

Side Effects ◽

Treatment Options ◽

Medical Knowledge ◽

Patient Relationship ◽

Physician Patient Relationship ◽

Specialized Knowledge ◽

Physician Patient ◽

The Relationship

The physician–patient relationship is anchored in trust. Historically the relationship has been a paternalistic one, with the patient expected to trust the physician's training and skills in doing what is “best” for the patient. But medical knowledge has expanded, as have treatment options and knowledge of the risks of treatment. The physician must now possess volumes of specialized knowledge about procedures and treatments, side effects and alternatives, drugs and their contraindications. Information has become a companion to trust. The patient, while still dependent on the physician's expertise, now wants information about choices and hazards in treatment. Expanded choice has made the patient a consumer of healthcare and its risks rather than a passive recipient of treatment from the professional.

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Talking to the System: Imre Mikó, 1911–1977

East Central Europe ◽

10.1163/18763308-04401002 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 44 (1) ◽

pp. 47-75 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Stefano Bottoni

Keyword(s):

The State ◽

Personal Contact ◽

The Political ◽

Security Officer ◽

Social Legitimacy ◽

State Security ◽

The People ◽

Push Forward ◽

The One ◽

Infrastructural Support

Taking a cue from an intelligence file produced by the Romanian political police on Transylvanian Hungarian intellectual Imre Mikó (Cluj, 1911–1977), the article analyzes the various patterns of accomodation with the political system, which represents a key to the understanding of how social legitimacy was built and maintained by the communist regimes of Eastern Europe. The framework in which this story takes place is especially interesting due to the Romanian context. On the one hand, the analysis of an unconventional collaboration established during the 1970s between the security organs of a national communist system and a prominent conservative intellectual stimulates us to rethink the state-society relationship in Ceaușescu’s Romania in more dynamic terms. Among the multiple reasons that led Mikó to accept the role of informer, one finds the communitarian ideology of “serving the people”, but also his belief that cooperation with the state security on relevant issues to the Transylvanian Hungarian community did not represent a betrayal of national ideals but the only way to achieve certain political goals, such as informing the Western public opinion on the worsening condition of the Hungarian minority. The case of Mikó can be compared with other files unveiled in Romania during the last years, and shows that often uncritically accepted definition of “collaboration” require serious conceptual reshaping. During the last decades of the communist regimes, significant parts of the formerly persecuted elite came to work together with the state security organs. They did not “talk to the system” with the purpose of spying on fellow citizens, but seeked to push forward their own cause with the infrastructural support of the state security, in a context where non-party members had been denied any access to the political sphere, and they regarded personal contact with a high-raking state security officer as a counterbalance of their marginality.

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