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.
For the editors of medical journals (particularly of The Lancet and the British Medical Journal) any inequality of outcome is ipso facto unjust.
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 are poverty and inequality (the poor indulge in unnecessary risk-taking to vent their rage, frustration, and despair at economic inequity). Those who concentrate on improving orthopedic technique are merely tinkering at the edges of human suffering and might even be making things worse by distracting attention from the real, underlying causes. The only way to free mankind of the curse of
