This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series Unmasking Medicine given by Ian Kennedy

was originally broadcast in 1980.

Six years ago, the American Psychiatric Association took a vote

and decided homosexuality was not an illness.

So since 1974, it hasn't been an illness. How extraordinary

you may think to decide what illness is by taking a vote. What exactly is going on here?

I've set as my task the unmasking of medicine. It isn't that I think there's something sinister

behind the mask, but I do detect a sense of curiosity, of medicine. It isn't that I think there's something sinister behind the mask,

but I do detect a sense of curiosity, of concern, if not disquiet. The practice of medicine

has changed. There's a feeling abroad that all may not be well. This feeling grows out of a sense

of distance, out of a sense that medicine is in the hands of experts

and sets its own path. We can take it or leave it. Heart transplants, the definition of death,

the treatment of the dying, the sad fate of care in Quinlan, the selective treatment

of handicapped newly born babies, the treatment of the mentally ill.

There's a long list of issues which are deeply troubling, but which seem effectively to be kept

under wraps. One of the most successful ways of doing this is by making the issues and problems

appear to be medical, technical ones, not really for the rest of us at all. This can be accomplished by

the simple device of translating the issue into medical language. I don't mean by this

translating it into the technical terms we associate with medicine, but embracing it within the

conceptual framework of medicine. The first step on the way to understanding modern medicine,

looking behind the mask,

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