What happens then is like what happens when we separate a jigsaw puzzle into its fuve hundred pieces: The over-all picture disappears. This is the state of modern medicine: It has lost the sense of the unity of man. Such is the price it has paid for its scientific progress. It has sacrificed art to science.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the loss of wholeness in modern medicine due to its focus on scientific advancements at the expense of understanding the unity of human experience.
Paul Tournier's quote compares the fragmentation of human understanding in modern medicine to a jigsaw puzzle that, when disassembled, loses its overall picture. It suggests that the advancement of science has led to a neglect of the human element, emphasizing that true health and healing require a holistic perspective that integrates art and science, rather than solely relying on empirical methodologies.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of holistic care in healthcare education.
It is quite clear that between love and understanding there is a very close link...He who loves understands, and he who understands loves. One who feels understood feels loved, and one who feels loved feels sure of being understood.
That is what marriage really means; helping one another to reach the full status of being persons, responsible and autonomous beings who do not run away from life.
In order to really understand, we need to listen, not reply. We need to listen long and attentively. In order to help anybody to open his heart we have to give him time, asking only a few questions, as carefully as possible in order to help him better explain his experience.
Acceptance of one's life has nothing to do with resignation; it does not mean running away from the struggle. On the contrary, it means accepting it as it comes, with all the handicaps of heredity, of suffering, of psychological complexes and injustices.
The experience of being in between-between the time we leave home and arrive at our destination; between the time we leave adolescence and arrive at adulthood; between the time we leave doubt and arrive at faith. It is like the time when a trapeze artist lets go the bars and hangs in midair, ready to catch another support: it is a time of danger, of expectation, of uncertainty, of excitement, or extraordinary aliveness.
The most tragic consequence of our criticism of a man is to block his way to humiliation and grace, precisely to drive him into the mechanisms of self justification and into his faults instead of freeing him from them. For him, our voice drowns the voice of God.
As soon as you believe that a label you've put on yourself is true, you've limited something that is literally limitless, you've limited who you are into nothing but a thought.
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion.
Who should listen to discussions of theology? Those for whom it is a serious undertaking, not just another subject like any other for entertaining small-talk, after the races, the theater, songs, food, and sex: for there are people who count chatter on theology and clever deployment of arguments as one of their amusements.
I've always been keenly aware of the passing of time. I've always thought that I was old. Even when I was twelve, I thought it was awful to be thirty. I felt that something was lost. At the same time, I was aware of what I could gain, and certain periods of my life have taught me a great deal. But, in spite of everything, I've always been haunted by the passing of time and by the fact that death keeps closing in on us.
Mr. Lyell's system of geology is just half the truth, and no more. He affirms a great deal that is true, and he denies a great deal which is equally true; which is the general characteristic of all systems not embracing the whole truth.
When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.
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