Abstract
THE aim of science is to discover the “laws of Nature,” and in its truest, though narrowest, sense it is the pursuit of this knowledge for its own sake, irrespective of any practical use to which it may be put. The primary aim of medicine is the practical one of healing the sick or of preventing disease, and therefore, in the narrower sense, medicine is not a science, but an art. Physiology, pathology, and pharmacology are sciences in the strictest sense; medicine is the art of applying the laws established by these sciences to the prevention or cure of disease. More than this, it is the very human art of treating the patient as well as his disease. But in a broader, and surely more natural, sense we may regard medicine as a science. Pathology may, it is true, be pursued as an abstract subject, but in real life it is inseparable from medicine. Treatment and prevention are so intimately based upon a right understanding of the nature of disease and of the laws which govern its course that I refuse to separate pathology and medicine. It has too long been the fashion to limit the sphere of pathology to the dead-house and the laboratory; its field is equally at the bedside, and, indeed, I would assert that there is no method of studying the natural history of disease which pathology may not claim as its proper province. By Harvey's injunction I am to admonish you to seek out the truths of Nature by observation and by experiment. These are two different ways of pursuing a subject, and, indeed, the concrete sciences have been divided into the “observational” and the “experimental”; anatomy is an observational science, physiology an experimental one. The observational sciences long preceded the experimental, and in pathology and medicine, which partake of the nature of both, the experimental method is of late growth.
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ANDREWES, F. Birth and Growth of Science in Medicine1. Nature 106, 611–614 (1921). https://doi.org/10.1038/106611a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/106611a0