The Genesis of Modern Medicine

1.0 Abstract

The genesis of modern medicine is generally taken to have begun with the teachings of a master physician in ancient Greece, named Hippocrates. The empirico-rational core of these innovative teachings of medicine was rooted in Greek philosophy, but they also embodied, centrally, a purely speculative doctrine about the nature of human maladies.

The Hippocratic teachings were much extended, with that doctrine upheld, by Galen in Rome, half-a-millennium later. That doctrine misled medicine, seriously, till quite recently. But nevertheless, the Hippocratic philosophy of practice-based learning has been the basis for the development of quite substantial a knowledge-base for medicine.

The recent advent of medical science in particular has served to make a wealth of ‘tools’ to be available to physicians. This has greatly increased the complexity of the requisite knowledge-base of medicine – and this, in turn, has led to inescapable fragmentation of medicine into differentiated disciplines of it (cf. Preface).