Medicine, History of Western

Abstract

At all times and in all cultures, attempts have been made and still are made, to cure diseases and alleviate suffering. In medicine in its narrow sense, the physician's appropriate action is derived from medico-scientific knowledge. Thus medicine developed as soon as diseases came to be explained ‘according to nature’ and were treated with scientific rationality. In the European context this took place in the fourth century BC in ancient Greece. We speak of ‘medicine’ and ‘physician’ only in contexts where diseases are not primarily seen in magical, mythical, religious, or purely empirical references. From ancient scientific beginnings in humoral pathology, different historical concepts of medicine have been generated via iatro-astrology, iatro-physics, iatro-chemistry, and iatro-morphology to the modern concept of iatro-technology. Concepts of medicine comprise a continuous causal interrelation between a particular physiology, a particular pathology, and its deducible therapy. This inner perspective of the scientific and conceptual history of Western medicine is broadened by an outer perspective. Guided by socio-historical, historico-sociological, and anthropological approaches, the institutional and organizational history of Western medicine is focused. In recent decades the leading concept of iatro-technological medicine is in transition to the molecular concept of medicine. The scientific medicine of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the reproductive rearguard of industrialization. By contrast, the medicine of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is a forerunner of the ongoing scientific, economic, and social change. The transition to molecular medicine will reshape the concept of the human body and thus change individual life and the social world accordingly.