Abstract: The CENTRAL PROBLEM of medicine may be phrased in the simple question, how can we best treat the patient? But after we grant that the patient's welfare is the center of all medical activity, we must then ask,<i>why</i>do we treat him in the way we do? Why use this treatment rather than that? In general the physician can offer one or both of two answers: (a)<i>Experience</i>shows that this treatment works. (b)<i>Reason</i>shows that it ought to work. These two categories, experience and reason, empiricism and rationalism, represent two polar aspects of medicine, the practice and the theory, the clinic and the textbook. We might say that empiricism indicates<i>how</i>to do something, while rationalism tells us<i>why</i>we do it. This distinction has run all through medical history. There were those who stressed the doing and those who stressed the explaining. Hippocrates, the great figure
Publication Year: 1964
Publication Date: 1964-02-15
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref', 'pubmed']
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Cited By Count: 5
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