Holistic Concepts of Illness in Ancient Greece and in Contemporary Medicine

Abstract

Let us start with the following assumption: Having taken seriously Rudolf Virchow’s prophecy of the early 19th century “medicine will be a natural science or it will not exist any longer”, modern medicine has decisively adopted the rationality of the natural sciences as the legitimizing cornerstone of its practice without questioning (or only marginally questioning) the possibility that there may be a difference between rationality of scientific investigation and rationality of therapeutic interaction. As you know, Virchow was the founder of Cellular Pathology, the milestone of medicine on its way towards achieving that scientific orientation in its research, training, and diagnostic and therapeutic action, which was already the basis of common consent within the scientific community of mathematicians, physicists and chemists.