Natural Philosophy

Natural philosophy was the study of the natural world through reason and observation (what we now call science, though the term carried broader connotations until the nineteenth century). For over two thousand years, medicine’s theoretical foundations were derived from natural philosophy rather than from clinical observation alone. Physicians who wanted to explain why diseases behaved as they did turned to natural philosophy for their principles: Aristotelian physics, elemental theory, mechanics, chemistry. The relationship was productive and constraining in equal measure. Natural philosophy provided medicine with explanatory power, but it also imposed theoretical frameworks that clinical evidence could not easily overturn.

The Milesian Beginning

The concept of natural philosophy as an enterprise distinct from myth begins with the pre-Socratic Greeks. Longrigg traces the decisive transition to the Milesian philosophers (Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes) who pioneered the move from mythological to natural explanation of phenomena such as rain, earthquakes, thunder, and eclipses. Rain, previously attributed to Zeus, was now held to be squeezed from clouds by compression. This same rational outlook was then applied to medicine by the Hippocratic authors (Longrigg, 1998).

The importance of this transition for medicine cannot be overstated. Once disease was understood as a natural phenomenon with natural causes, it became amenable to rational inquiry and natural treatment. The Hippocratic text On the Sacred Disease, which argued that epilepsy was no more sacred than any other illness, is the canonical expression of this principle. But the principle itself originated in natural philosophy, not in medicine.

The Aristotelian Framework

Medieval natural philosophy was not a single system but a family of doctrines derived from Aristotle and organized around his distinctions between form, matter, and the four causes. By 1500, European learning drew on Greek and Arabic intermediaries: a single scholar, Gerard of Cremona (c. 1114-87), is credited with at least seventy translations including Avicenna’s Canon of medicine (Hall, A. Rupert, 1954). This transmission preserved Aristotle’s biological psychology, which distinguished three souls: vegetative (controlling digestion and reproduction in all living things), sensitive (shared by animals), and intellectual (specific to humans); it assigned physiological functions accordingly (Hall, A. Rupert, 1954).

The route by which Peripatetic natural philosophy passed into Arabic was not direct translation but a three-stage relay. An Arabic abbreviation of a Syriac text on meteorology attributed to Theophrastus opens with the translator’s notice, “I have found a work in Syriac by Theophrastus which I here present in abbreviated form,” demonstrating the Greek-Syriac-Arabic chain in practice.(Franz Rosenthal, 1965) The content transmitted through that chain was methodologically consistent with the Aristotelian program: Theophrastus attributed seven causes to thunder, four to lightning, and mechanical accounts to snow, lunar haloes, and tornadoes, each illustrated by everyday analogy rather than divine agency.(Franz Rosenthal, 1965)(Franz Rosenthal, 1965)(Franz Rosenthal, 1965)(Franz Rosenthal, 1965)(Franz Rosenthal, 1965) What the Syriac intermediary preserved was not merely information but the Peripatetic explanatory habit of seeking physical mechanism over supernatural cause — the same habit that, once transmitted into Arabic, shaped how Islamic philosophers understood the natural world.

The Hellenistic theory of four elements (fire, air, water, earth) paired with four primary qualities (hot, cold, dry, moist) formed the cosmological backbone of both natural philosophy and medicine throughout the medieval period (Hall, A. Rupert, 1954). The depth of resonance between Aristotelian natural philosophy and the Hippocratic tradition suggests this was not a later imposition but a convergence already present in the classical sources: Aristotle’s theory of four elements, his fourfold analysis of causality into material, formal, efficient, and teleological causes, and his understanding of the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm all resonate with themes familiar from the Hippocratic corpus.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) This was not a merely theoretical commitment. It organized the pharmacopoeia, structured clinical reasoning, and determined how physicians classified both disease and remedy. In pharmacology, native Germanic herbal lore mingled with Hellenistic botanical sources, producing a discipline in which plant identification itself was uncertain and nomenclature varied by region (Hall, A. Rupert, 1954). Pickstone’s concept of “natural history” as a distinct way of knowing encompasses precisely this mode of engagement with plants and phenomena: the description, classification, and biographical tracking of things, foundational to both analysis and experimentation (Pickstone, John V., 2001).

Competing natural philosophical schools within the Greco-Roman world had already made the relationship between medicine and philosophy contentious. The Roman-era physician Asclepiades of Bithynia, working in the first century BCE, presented a philosophically based medical system grounded in atomism: the body composed of atoms of various sizes in constant motion through passageways, with illness resulting from blockage or excessive looseness (Wesley D. Smith, 1979). His framework required him to reject the Hippocratic notion of critical days in disease and to criticize virtually all his predecessors, initiating a pattern of competitive medical theorizing that would recur throughout early modern medicine (Wesley D. Smith, 1979).

The diversity of natural philosophical foundations was on display in Celsus’s summary of competing disease theories, written under Tiberius (14-37 CE). Celsus himself offered an influential reinterpretation of Hippocrates as the physician who first separated medicine from philosophy, a novel claim that contradicted earlier accounts, making Hippocrates the founder of dogmatic medical science rather than merely an acute observer (Wesley D. Smith, 1979). His list of competing causal theories illustrates the breadth of natural philosophical commitments at stake: philosophers attributed disease to excess or deficiency among the four elements; Herophilus to humors; Hippocrates to pneuma; Erasistratus to blood entering pneumatic vessels; Asclepiades to blockage of atoms (Wesley D. Smith, 1979). The Pneumatic school, founded by Athenaeus, described a cosmos held together by pneuma, where health was eucrasia (proper mixture) and disease dyscrasia, a synthesis that gave physicians a philosophical lens for reexamining traditional medicine while drawing more from Aristotle and the Stoics than from Hippocrates (Wesley D. Smith, 1979).

Medicine as a Branch of Natural Philosophy

In the medieval university, medicine was formally classified as a branch of natural philosophy. Siraisi describes how medical education at Italian and French universities was structured around Aristotelian natural philosophy, with students studying Aristotle’s Physics, De Anima, and biological works as prerequisites for medical theory (Siraisi, 1990). The institutional requirement was explicit, particularly in Italy: doctors had to undergo training in philosophy before embarking on their medical training, linking medicine directly to the Aristotelian and Platonic traditions as a formal precondition of practice.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) Galenic physiology was understood as an application of Aristotelian principles (the four elements, the four qualities, the concepts of mixture and temperament) to the human body.

This was not merely an institutional arrangement. The dependence was intellectual. The theory of the four humors drew its explanatory force from the Aristotelian theory of the four elements; the logic of treatment by contraries derived from Aristotelian physics; the concept of innate heat came from Aristotle’s biology. When physicians debated whether a fever was hot or cold, they were conducting arguments whose premises came from natural philosophy (Siraisi, 1990).

Galenic physiology built on this framework an elaborately structured account of the body’s economy. Venous blood was formed in the liver and distributed to the parts in an ebb-and-flow motion; arterial blood, enriched with vital spirits in the left ventricle, was physiologically distinct and served a different function. Hall describes the three “coctions” by which food was transformed into chyle, then blood, then flesh; the liver was the source and center of blood distribution (Hall, A. Rupert, 1954). Medicine was the only discipline in 1500 capable of standing somewhat detached from theology’s intellectual primacy, yet even the teaching of medicine and the supervision of dissection remained subject to ecclesiastical control (Hall, A. Rupert, 1954). Renaissance humanism did not automatically ease this tension: admiration for Galen led some scholars to believe he could not err even as anatomists like Vesalius were beginning to overturn his observations (Hall, A. Rupert, 1954).

The Construction of Hippocratic Authority

The history of medicine as an intellectual discipline was substantially shaped by how natural philosophical credentials were assigned to ancient figures. Smith’s analysis of the Hippocratic tradition reveals that the image of Hippocrates as founder of rational medicine was not derived from historical study but was constructed by medical men pursuing their own current scientific interests (Wesley D. Smith, 1979). The change in scholarly opinion between the Renaissance and the nineteenth century occurred without new textual evidence; it reflected a shift in interpretive framework, not new discoveries (Wesley D. Smith, 1979).

Paracelsus (1493-1541) made the first significant move in dissociating Hippocrates from Galen, claiming Hippocrates had possessed the true medical spirit while Galen and other “sophists” had perverted it. This positive image, Smith shows, depended largely on mythology from the pseudepigraphic Letters and Speech from the Altar rather than on study of the actual texts (Wesley D. Smith, 1979). Francis Bacon condemned ancient systems as “fruitful of controversies but barren of works” (Wesley D. Smith, 1979) while simultaneously distinguishing Hippocrates from all other ancients, praising his methodology of careful case recording as appropriate to the new science Bacon envisioned, thus establishing the template for a “new Hippocratism” premised on observation rather than doctrine (Wesley D. Smith, 1979).

Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689), the “English Hippocrates,” carried this program forward: associated with John Locke and Robert Boyle, he pursued a “natural history of disease” through careful case recording, and in treatment he was expectative rather than active, guided by the Hippocratic principle of allowing nature to heal (Wesley D. Smith, 1979). For the early new Hippocratism, “Hippocrates” functioned as a spirit and a method rather than a body of doctrine; the scholarly rewriting of medical history to justify this usage came later (Wesley D. Smith, 1979).

Smith argues that the standard narrative of Hippocrates liberating medicine from priests, tyrants, and speculation is an etiological myth: an analytical scheme dressed as a narrative of events, whose form derives from Enlightenment ideals of individual genius overcoming institutional constraint (Wesley D. Smith, 1979). Recognition of this mythological dimension does not diminish the importance of the Hippocratic texts; it clarifies how natural philosophy has always been both a resource for medical reasoning and a screen onto which later practitioners projected their own scientific ideals.

The Seventeenth-Century Crisis

The transformation of natural philosophy in the seventeenth century (the period loosely called the Scientific Revolution) created a crisis for medicine. The Aristotelian framework that had underwritten Galenic theory was being replaced, but by what? Wear describes mid-seventeenth-century England as a marketplace of competing natural philosophies: Aristotelian, mechanical/corpuscular, and chemical, with no single dominant view (Wear, 2000).

Hall identifies a structural limitation in pre-Harveian biology: experimentation was hindered not only by technical difficulties but by the absence of conceptual frameworks that would give meaning to biological experiments (Hall, A. Rupert, 1954). Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood illustrates how a new natural philosophical framework, rather than new facts, transformed understanding. Harvey had little that was factually new; his merit was to integrate known but ineffective facts into a new and comprehensive generalization: treating the heart as a pump, blood as a fluid, and the vascular system as a hydraulic circuit (Hall, A. Rupert, 1954). In doing so he disregarded “spirits” altogether as explanatory entities.

Each new natural philosophy generated its own medical system. Cartesian mechanism produced iatromechanism; Paracelsian and Helmontian chemistry produced iatrochemistry; Newtonian physics influenced eighteenth-century medical systematists. Coulter’s analysis frames this as the defining dynamic of early modern medicine: the seventeenth-century Rationalist physicians drew their theoretical categories from disciplines external to therapeutics (chemistry, mechanics, mathematics), reversing the Empirical priority of deriving theory from practice (Coulter, 1975). Coulter identifies the epistemological stakes precisely: where Empiricism held that reliable knowledge of drugs and treatment comes from practice, Descartes founded the Rationalist counterattack on the claim that sense-perception is unreliable and that medical practice must instead be grounded in a theory of physical causes derived through mathematical reasoning.(Coulter, 1975)

The problem, as Kuhn observed, was that the relationship between natural philosophy and practical knowledge was not straightforward. Baconian natural histories, compilations of observations about heat, color, wind, mining, were “filled with information, some of it recondite,” but they did not by themselves generate useful theory (Kuhn, 1962). The gap between philosophical principle and clinical application was large, and the history of iatrochemistry and iatromechanism demonstrated the danger of premature bridging.

The Mechanical Philosophy and Its Alternatives

The most influential natural philosophical program of the seventeenth century was the mechanical philosophy, developed with greatest systematicity by René Descartes. Descartes accepted Harvey’s circulation of the blood but rejected Harvey’s account of the forceful systole, replacing it with a theory of forceful diastole driven by the vaporization of blood entering the heart’s natural heat (French, 1994). Descartes was so committed to his account that he stated if what he wrote about the heart was wrong, then so was the rest of his philosophy, making the motion of the heart the central test case and exemplar of his entire natural-philosophical system (French, 1994).

This was not a merely academic distinction. Harvey’s and Descartes’ natural philosophies were mutually exclusive at the level of epistemology. Harvey sought causal knowledge of purpose through sensory observation and proceeded in the Aristotelian manner, while Descartes excluded purposive causes and derived knowledge deductively from first principles of particulate mechanism (French, 1994). What individuals made of Harvey’s doctrines depended on what was already in their minds (their natural philosophy, religious commitments, and professional obligations) before they read about circulation (French, 1994).

Descartes modelled the human body as a machine made by God’s hands, with death resulting from mechanical failure of its parts and no life-forces or souls required to maintain bodily activity (Hall, A. Rupert, 1954). Despite being factually flawed in its account of the heartbeat, Cartesian mechanical physiology exerted lasting influence because it justified experimental inquiry in biology: by treating physiological processes as subject to material causes, it removed the barrier between organic and inorganic that spirits, occult agencies, and Paracelsian archeus had maintained (Hall, A. Rupert, 1954).

Not all natural philosophers accepted the Cartesian direction. Robert Fludd agreed that blood circulated but accommodated the doctrine within a Rosicrucian alchemical worldview, where pulmonary transit was essential for the entry of divine spirit into the body via inspired air (French, 1994). Fludd rejected Aristotelian school natural philosophy as pagan, substituting the philosophy of Moses and direct divine action for local causality (French, 1994). Chemical or Paracelsian practitioners were generally unlikely to accept Harvey’s anatomical program because they preferred a “cosmic anatomy” in which bodily parts corresponded to features of the heavens rather than to the Aristotelian action-use-utility rationality (French, 1994).

Francis Glisson (died 1677), Regius Professor of Physic at Cambridge and a key transmitter of Harvey’s doctrines, developed a vitalist alternative to Cartesian mechanism centered on the principle that matter was self-mobile or “energetic,” derived from his belief that matter was, like spirit, ultimately a divine emanation (French, 1994). Glisson’s natural philosophy began with the traditional distinction between natura naturans (God) and natura naturata (creation), treating the demonstration of God’s existence as the proper beginning of any course on physical principles (French, 1994). Protestant varieties of belief shaped his thinking at the deepest level: he distinguished revealed knowledge of God, personal knowledge, and knowledge derived from creatures in a way that mapped Protestant theological commitments onto the structure of natural philosophical inquiry (French, 1994).

The Cambridge that had educated Harvey in Aristotelian philosophy became an important center from which Harvey’s views were subsequently disseminated (French, 1994). This institutional transmission was never philosophically neutral: Glisson could not accept that the heart alone caused circulation because his vitalist conviction that matter was innately mobile required him to give both arteries and blood an active role (French, 1994). The reception of any natural philosophical discovery depended on the prior commitments of its recipients as much as on the strength of its evidence.

Mathematics Challenges Natural Philosophy

A major reconfiguration of natural philosophy came from mathematicians who claimed that their discipline yielded genuine causal knowledge of nature, not merely quantitative descriptions. Aristotelian natural philosophers in the sixteenth century had explicitly denied that mathematics was a true science, on the grounds that it lacked causal demonstrations: mathematical proofs described quantitative properties without reaching the essences of things (Peter Dear, 2001). Galileo’s early work challenged this hierarchy by applying Archimedean mathematical reasoning to falling bodies, asking not why heavy bodies fall (a natural philosopher’s question) but how fast they fall (Peter Dear, 2001).

The label “physico-mathematics” emerged in the early seventeenth century to designate the ambiguous union of physical and mathematical inquiry, serving as a contested claim by mathematicians that their sciences gave genuine causal knowledge of nature (Peter Dear, 2001). When Galileo negotiated his move to the Medici court in 1610, he insisted on being titled “philosopher and mathematician,” a deliberate assertion that his work deserved not merely mathematical but philosophical recognition (Peter Dear, 2001). Kepler’s Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae (1618) declared astronomy to be a part of physics because it sought the causes of celestial motions (Peter Dear, 2001), while Kepler’s broader cosmological program treated geometry as a key to God’s plan in creating the universe.

Dear argues that both Bacon’s utilitarian reformation and the physico-mathematical movement worked in concert: both elevated operational and mathematically-structured knowledge to the prestige formerly held by contemplative Aristotelian natural philosophy (Peter Dear, 2001). The result was not a single replacement but a contested field in which the very meaning of “natural philosophy” was at stake.

Isaac Newton’s Principia mathematica (1687) crystallized the tension. His work described forces (notably gravity) without providing a mechanical explanation of their transmission or source (Peter Dear, 2001). Continental philosophers including Huygens, Leibniz, and Régis dismissed the Principia as merely mathematical description rather than true natural philosophy, demanding that it provide actual mechanical causes for gravity (Peter Dear, 2001). Newton privately acknowledged that action at a distance without a material medium was “inconceivable,” but left the question open (Peter Dear, 2001). The Cartesian tradition responded by transforming Descartes’s ambition of metaphysical certainty into a more modest search for mechanical intelligibility. Huygens and Rohault departed significantly from Descartes’s conception of true natural philosophy by emphasizing the hypothetical character of their explanatory mechanisms (Peter Dear, 2001); Huygens argued that human beings cannot understand explanations other than those couched in terms of inert matter in motion, without this being a guarantee of how God actually made the universe (Peter Dear, 2001).

Eighteenth-century Newtonianism resolved these tensions by a selective process: Newton’s alchemy and theological studies were purged from his legacy, and his empiricist natural philosophy was combined with Lockean epistemology to produce a rational empiricist ideology (Peter Dear, 2001). What counted as “Newtonian” by the later eighteenth century was in many ways different from what Newton himself had believed: a hybrid of Newton’s, Descartes’s, Leibniz’s, and many others’ contributions (Peter Dear, 2001).

Natural Philosophy and Travel

Cook’s analysis in Matters of Exchange adds a dimension often missing from intellectual histories: the role of travel and commerce in transforming natural philosophy. The early modern period saw natural philosophy reshaped by new information flowing from global trade routes, colonial encounters, and the exchange networks of merchants and travelers. Cook describes how travel was understood as epistemologically decisive, introducing new words, ideas, and facts through weak ties between people who did not know each other well (Cook, 2007).

This matters for medicine because the new materia medica of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (quinine, ipecac, guaiacum, tobacco) came not from natural philosophy but from commercial and colonial contact. Natural philosophy had to accommodate these empirical additions rather than generating them, a pattern that would recur as laboratory science gradually displaced philosophical reasoning as medicine’s theoretical foundation.

Ways of Knowing: A Framework for Understanding Natural Philosophy’s Fate

The historian John Pickstone offers a framework for understanding why natural philosophy did not simply disappear when replaced: his concept of “ways of knowing” identifies five distinct modes (natural history, analysis, experimentalism, technoscience, and world-readings or hermeneutics) as ideal-typical categories for the history of science, technology, and medicine across the past three centuries (Pickstone, John V., 2001). These ways of knowing are ideal types in the Weberian sense: most scientific projects contain more than one, and the dominance of any one mode at a given time does not eliminate the others (Pickstone, John V., 2001).

Crucially for understanding natural philosophy, Pickstone argues that new ways of knowing are created historically but rarely disappear; the history of science, technology, and medicine is one of complex cumulation and simultaneous variety, not of successive replacements (Pickstone, John V., 2001). This directly challenges any narrative in which natural philosophy was simply “replaced” by experimental science.

Pickstone’s fifth mode, world-readings or hermeneutics, is the oldest way of knowing: it involves decoding nature for meaning, treating natural phenomena as texts to be interpreted (Pickstone, John V., 2001). Natural philosophy in its classical and medieval form was fundamentally hermeneutic in this sense: its practitioners sought to read the meanings of nature within a framework of cosmic intelligibility, whether Aristotelian, Platonic, Stoic, or Galenic. In the Renaissance, Pickstone argues, hermeneutic ways of knowing were dominant: natural history served natural philosophy, anatomical dissection illustrated texts rather than generating new doctrine, and other modes were nested within a fundamentally meaning-centered world-reading (Pickstone, John V., 2001).

The seventeenth century brought what Pickstone describes not as replacement but as displacement. Protestant disenchantment of nature partially sidelined hermeneutic readings in favor of natural history and analysis, but did not eliminate them (Pickstone, John V., 2001). In Protestant cultures, natural theology made the study of God’s creation a religious duty (Pickstone, John V., 2001), and Francis Bacon’s doctrine that man knows through creating linked natural history with craft, raising the status of artisanal and practical knowledge (Pickstone, John V., 2001). These were not the overthrow of natural philosophy but its reformation under new conditions.

Pickstone identifies natural history’s persistence as a way of knowing that modern accounts of the Scientific Revolution consistently underestimate. Ways of knowing are also ways of working, with characteristic locations, routines, and products (Pickstone, John V., 2001); the practical, observational, and biographical dimensions of natural philosophy never ceased to operate even as mathematical and experimental modes gained prestige. Alternative medicine traditions (from Hippocratic biographical observation to Thomas Sydenham’s empiricism to twentieth-century social medicine) represent persistent natural-historical modes of practice that have repeatedly contested analytical and experimental orthodoxies (Pickstone, John V., 2001). Herbal medicine, eclectic medicine, and physiomedical traditions fit this pattern: their practitioners work with the biography of the patient and the natural history of plants, resisting purely analytical reduction (Pickstone, John V., 2001).

Pickstone’s non-progressivist framework also explains why ways of knowing involve power relations rather than just epistemic claims: Rutherford’s famous remark that “science is either physics or stamp-collecting” asserted experimentalism and pursuit of the general over natural history and analysis, reflecting the internal politics of knowledge-mode hierarchies rather than an accurate description of scientific practice (Pickstone, John V., 2001). The equation of “science” with laboratory experiment has systematically marginalized analytical and natural-historical modes that remain essential to clinical medicine, ecology, and public health (Pickstone, John V., 2001).

The End of Natural Philosophy

Natural philosophy did not disappear; it was gradually replaced by specialized sciences. By the mid-nineteenth century, the term “scientist” (coined by William Whewell in 1833) had displaced “natural philosopher,” and the unified inquiry into nature had fractured into physics, chemistry, biology, and their subdivisions. Medicine’s relationship to these successor disciplines remained as dependent as ever, but the dependence was now on specific experimental sciences rather than on a comprehensive philosophical framework.

The loss was real. Natural philosophy had asked questions about the nature of life, health, and disease that the specialized sciences often declined to engage. The vitalism debates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were in part a protest against the narrowing of inquiry that specialization imposed. Whether medicine lost something essential when it ceased to ground itself in natural philosophy is a question that the philosophy of medicine continues to address.

Scholarly Assessment

Smith’s The Hippocratic Tradition (1979) establishes that scholarly narratives of natural philosophy’s role in the origins of medicine have been systematically distorted by the progressive assumptions medical historians inherited from the physicians they studied. Historians came to imitate scientists in their notion of true method, their optimism, and their emphasis on the basic importance of things that survived or were influential (Wesley D. Smith, 1979). The result was an etiological myth in which Hippocrates appeared as a unique genius who freed medicine from theological constraint and philosophical speculation, a myth whose form derives from Enlightenment values, not from historical evidence.

French’s William Harvey’s Natural Philosophy (1994) demonstrates that the reception of any major discovery in natural philosophy was mediated at every level by prior commitments. What a seventeenth-century physician made of Harvey’s circulation depended on which natural philosophy he had absorbed, which religious tradition shaped his thinking, and which professional community he owed allegiance to (French, 1994). Harvey himself appears to have treated his discovery as philosophical rather than medical, separating the truth of his philosophical novelty from the professional business of maintaining Galenic medical practice; he likely published De motu cordis abroad to avoid putting the College of Physicians in a difficult position (French, 1994).

Dear’s Revolutionizing the Sciences (2001) traces how the Cartesian and Newtonian programs each constituted distinct responses to the question of what natural philosophy was for: Descartes sought metaphysical certainty grounded in mechanism; Newton sought mathematical precision while leaving causes deliberately open; and later “Newtonianism” was a hybrid that neither fully resembled (Peter Dear, 2001). Hall’s The Scientific Revolution (1954) shows that the biological sciences lagged the physical sciences precisely because they lacked the conceptual frameworks that would give experimental results meaning (Hall, A. Rupert, 1954), the same problem that confronted herbal practitioners when laboratories began producing pharmaceuticals through routes that bypassed the clinical tradition entirely.

Pickstone’s coexistence model offers the most useful analytical purchase on why natural philosophy has not simply disappeared: the ways of knowing it institutionalized (particularly world-reading and natural history) remain active in every domain of medicine and healing that cannot be reduced to laboratory experiment (Pickstone, John V., 2001). The periodic rediscovery of “holism” or “systems thinking” in medicine is not a novelty but a recurrence of natural-philosophical commitments that were displaced but never eliminated.

See Also

• Scientific Revolution
• Scientific Method
• Iatrochemistry
• Empiricism in Medicine
• Rationalism
• Francis Bacon
• Aristotle
• Vitalism
• William Harvey
• Hippocratic Tradition

Sources

All claims cite evidence cards from:

• Longrigg, J. (1998). Greek Medicine from the Heroic to the Hellenistic Age. London: Duckworth. [Source ID: longrigg-greek-medicine-heroic-1998]
• Siraisi, N.G. (1990). Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Source ID: siraisi-medievalmedicine-1990]
• Wear, A. (2000). Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550-1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Source ID: wear-knowledgepractice-2000]
• Cook, H.J. (2007). Matters of Exchange. New Haven: Yale University Press. [Source ID: cook-mattersofexchange-2007]
• Coulter, H.L. (1975). Divided Legacy. Washington, DC: Wehawken. [Source ID: coulter-divided-legacy-1975]
• Kuhn, T.S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Source ID: kuhn-scientificrevolutions-1962]
• Pickstone, J.V. (2001). Ways of Knowing. Manchester: Manchester University Press. [Source ID: pickstone-waysofknowing-2001]
• Smith, W.D. (1979). The Hippocratic Tradition. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. [Source ID: smith-hippocratic-tradition-1979]
• French, R. (1994). William Harvey’s Natural Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Source ID: french-william-harvey-natural-1994]
• Dear, P. (2001). Revolutionizing the Sciences. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Source ID: dear-revolutionizing-sciences-2001]
• Hall, A.R. (1954). The Scientific Revolution 1500-1800. London: Longmans. [Source ID: hall-scientific-revolution-1954]
• Jackson, Mark (ed.). Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine. Oxford University Press, 2011. Chapters 4, 26.