The Medical Sciences

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521572439.021

20 - The Medical Sciences

from Part II - Disciplines

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

Thomas Broman

Edited by

Roy Porter

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Roy Porter: Affiliation:
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London

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Summary

Mention the term “medical science” to someone, and it is likely to evoke an image of white-coated scientists working at a laboratory bench. In the mind of a more historically informed listener, the term might produce a more specific image – of Louis Pasteur gazing at a test tube, of Xavier Bichat bending over one of his corpses in the Hotel-Dieu, or even of William Harvey ligating a vein – but the general meaning would remain largely the same, because for us the association between “medical science” and “experiment” is a powerful one. Yet for all its pervasiveness, this association is misleading when we consider the medical sciences in the eighteenth century. An image far more appropriate than the laboratory would be the simple podium or lectern, for the medical sciences were understood by eighteenth-century physicians primarily as a body of theoretical doctrines that formed one part of the university medical curriculum. The medical sciences, especially the subjects of physiology and pathology, furnished the bridge between medical knowledge proper and the domain of natural philosophy. And natural philosophy attempted in turn to provide a comprehensive theoretical knowledge of the elemental makeup of the world and the motions of matter. Therefore, insofar as physiology and pathology explained the composition and actions of the living body in its healthy and diseased states and rendered those explanations in terms consistent with natural philosophy, they legitimated medicine’s claim to the status of scientific knowledge.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 463 - 484

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521572439.021 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2003

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20 - The Medical Sciences

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