Medicine, History, and the Idea of Man

Abstract

Medicine and the ideas by which an era lives have an intimate relationship. The dominant idea of man in each culture determines and is determined by medicine, whose prime concern must be with the person. The idea of man has undergone successive interpretations in the primitive Greek, Medieval, and modern worlds. These interpretations have profoundly affected the medical behavior of each era, and an understanding of this behavior is incomplete without reference to the dominating cultural ideas. Some of the intellectual disquietude of modern man has its roots in the insufficiency of modern culture and medicine to cultivate the common ground between them. Each struggles with but cannot fully incorpo rate man's personal and societal dimensions. The gradual transformation of the classical and medieval philosophies of man under the influences of experimental science and modern philosophy has tended to produce a loss of identity. Are we on the verge of a fuller definition of the nature of man—con sonant with the traditional view but expanded and fulfilled by the dominant note in our culture, that of science?