Introduction

Abstract

This book about the philosophy of modern medicine¹ is written within the broad parameters of the framework as set out below:

• 1. Such a medicine is scientific medicine; as such it can only be understood as part of modern science.

• 2. The beginnings of such a medicine2 may be dated to at least the seventeenth century just as modern science itself may similarly be dated.

• 3. Modern science cannot be understood in a vacuum without tracing it back to modern philosophy in which it is embedded.

The book explores in detail the implications of the three theses outlined above, establishing that the major characteristics of such a medicine as well as such a science follow more or less directly from their philosophical foundation and source.³ Thus it is not an accident that modern medicine is atomistic, reductionist, mechanistic as well as technology- oriented as the philosophical worldview from which it follows is bounded by the same parameters.