Pharmakos were those unfortunates in Ancient Greece who happened to be poor and crippled and without any local, prosperous, relatives to succour them, who were thus forced into slavery, begging or petty criminality.
When a crisis arose and the normally smoothly streamlined social sphere developed strains and cracks, the Pharmakos were scapegoated restored it.
Social 'bumps' (the Pharmakos) were beaten out - metaphorically as well as in actuality - to return streamlining and normalcy.
This was done by a sacred solemn ritual of executing, expelling or beating a physically, mentally or culturally deformed (misfitting) individual , preferably one without any powerful relatives close by to exact possible vengeance.
I have always wondered why the wartime American NAS felt it was so very very important to strenuously deny penicillin to the very small number of SBE patients asking for it between the summer of 1942 and the summer of 1943.
They were the only patients denied lifesaving penicillin for a condition where penicillin was not just a cure but the only cure.
(I have absolutely no qualms about denying penicillin (limited or not) to dying patients against which penicillin had no possible effect - viral diseases for one.)
One of the biggest social strains a war produces on the home front is the inequality of individual and family sacrifice - who goes to war and gets shot - who stays home and gets promoted ever upwards into the slots of those away fighting overseas.
I believe that the upwardly mobile chicken hawks on the NAS Death Panels turning down these SBE requests (and thus sentencing innocents to a quasi-judicial death) may have unconsciously felt they were thus 'dealing death' just like those of their age group who had been or were in combat zones - salving in a complex way their own internal social strain and bumpiness.
Who can tell ...?
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