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20 - The Medical Sciences

from Part II - Disciplines

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Thomas Broman
Edited by
Roy Porter
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.

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Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 463 - 484
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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  • The Medical Sciences
  • Edited by Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Science
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521572439.021
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  • The Medical Sciences
  • Edited by Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Science
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521572439.021
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The Medical Sciences
  • Edited by Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Science
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521572439.021
Available formats
×