“The Status of Brain in the Concept of Mind”

Extract

It is with no feigned modesty that I acknowledge, as a limited and superficial student of philosophy, the honour you have done me by your invitation to deliver the Manson Lecture. But if the honour is undeserved, it is by fortuitous circumstance the more appreciated. Dr. Manson was a family doctor in Warrington, Lancs., with whom I was privileged to have close professional associations. He was a man of many parts who regarded the isolation of medicine from philosophy as an unintelligible and lamentable phenomenon of our time. He wished to see philosophy restored to its earlier and rightful basic rôle in medical education. He recognized that medicine and, indeed, the cognate basic sciences were occupying themselves almost exclusively with so rapidly accelerating an accumulation of facts, that little time remained for reflection and interpretation, and for pondering on the place of medicine in, and its contribution to, the general corpus of knowledge. And he was especially interested in the topic which I have chosen for this commemorative lecture, for he recognized, and translated into practice, the dictum that “No disease is wholly physical, and none wholly mental.” He saw in his patient the “whole” man, not a summation of such isolates as body, mind, environment, and family.