Customer Reviews

Medicine before Science: The Business of Medicine from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment

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This book is a challenging overview of the philosophical and social basis upon which doctors practiced in the middle ages. Oddly enough, it has a different subtitle on the title page from the cover: "The Rational and Learned Doctor from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment." Both subtitles accurately describe the book (although the actual title, Medicine Before Science, is clearly problematic to anyone familar with the history of science; it seems to imply that science began in the Enlightenment, while everything before then was something less). French explains how the professional, learned, university-trained doctors--as opposed to the healers who treated the vast majority of the population--built upon philosophy and accumulated medical wisdom to explain illnesses and prognosticate on their patients, the "Latin tradition". This is also the story of how they built their repuations and convinced their wealthy patrons to trust them (the "Business of Medicine").

The book is challenging, especially for novices in ancient and medieval philosophy, but has rich insights through most of the text. The narrative disintegrates in the last third (as the Latin tradition splinters into many rival systems), but overall it is a worthwhile addition to the bookshelf of any historian of science or medicine.

I enjoyed reading this book, because I am curious to understand how much of my practice of medicine is based on science, and how much is tradition. Clearly, experimental science is the most important factor in creating the "miracles of modern medicine," but there are psychological factors in the doctor-patient relationship which cannot be ignored if one desires a clinical cure. And those psychological factors are very much influenced by the way medicine developed as a profession in Europe. This is not an "easy read," but I found it useful, interesting, and satisfying.