Medicine might at first sight appear to be an unpromising field for political correctness. After all, a broken leg is a broken leg, and there is pretty wide agreement about how to treat one, even among those who would agree about little else. But modern medicine rests upon intellectual foundations and institutional structures of precisely the kind that idle intellectuals love to destroy, rather as bored children pick the legs and wings off flies. And even fractured bones can be made to serve their turn in the great and ceaseless labor of undermining civilization.

The politically correct approach to broken legs is the following: accidents, as is well-known, happen much more frequently to the poor than to the rich. This is because of the impoverished and dangerous way in which the poor are forced by circumstance to live and work. The problem of broken legs will thus never be solved by mere curative treatment: we must go to its root causes, which a ...

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