There is a philosopher. He has been working on the subject of chance for a long time, and has maintained a range of his activities centered around his college, but has also written and edited books about his love affairs and love. He was diagnosed with breast cancer more than a dozen years ago, and had undergone several treatments, but recently he was told by his doctor that he had only a few months left, so it would be a good idea to look into hospice.

There is a medical anthropologist. While exercising, he was drawn to the world of anthropology by chance, and since then, like a philosopher, he made an enemy at university and explored the culture surrounding the body, disease, and food. Seriously, the two are almost the same age. The two met by chance while planning a lecture for citizens, and because of the lecture plan, a medical anthropologist learns about the philosopher's battle with illness. Normally, I would never have heard of such a story.

Philosophers think After all, this is what happened, why don't we exchange letters together? A medical anthropologist asks a philosopher about the chance and inevitability of disease, and a philosopher gets advice on medical culture from a medical anthropologist. As the letters come and go about a dozen times (or twenty times if counting each one), the philosopher's condition deteriorates and he is hospitalized in the intensive care unit, and dies while watching the letters come out in a book. A collection of epistles, the story of Makiko Miyano and Maho Isono's "Accidental Disease, Inevitable Death".

There is a medical ethicist. He believed that he would work as a patient care worker, but by accident he fell into the path of studying the medical humanities and medical ethics. Meanwhile, he has also been thinking about probabilities for a long time as a medical practitioner. Unlike his predecessors who studied medicine at a time when statistics were still introduced, even after statistics became the language of medicine, he does not want to deny what statistics offer. It is true that medical events occur probabilistically. It's just that we don't know the probability. The problem is that thinking like this makes it difficult to understand the disease experience we experience.

For example, he asks himself why his body is sick. He's had a sore shoulder for a long time, and in the worst cases he's thought he'd rather have his shoulder cut off. At orthopedic surgery, he was told that it was a musculoskeletal disease that was inevitable because of his job, and he thinks that explanation is correct. However, when he sees the people around him who are not sick and are taking good care of him, he sometimes gets lost in thought. Genetic characteristics, posture, habits, personality, etc. all had an effect, resulting in pain. But, why is it him? Was it something he did wrong, or was it unavoidable or unavoidable? If so, maybe I should call it fate. Whether it's because of my personality, habits, or something unavoidable, isn't it all fate?

See the original text:

https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/science/science_general/997472.html#csidxd8fc6307500946bb11d747d66386976