Medicine and the Soul of Science

Abstract

Bates argues that understanding the historical relationship between medicine and science can help to clarify what science itself is, and exactly how it differs from other kinds of knowledge. In particular, it is directly relevant to the so-called "Needham question": why did the Scientific Revolution happen in western Europe, even though the East, particularly China, boasted greater achievements in technology? The question needs to be re-framed: it is not technology which made the Scientific Revolution, but mechanism. Medicine as a philosophical inquiry into life-processes, though often dismissed as impervious to the Scientific Revolution, was actually a driving force for mechanism. This is because the new mechanism of the 17th century was a fusion of revived ancient itomism with another ancient style of mechanistic thinking, which Bates called “organic mechanism” or “technism.” The primary expression or organic mechanism was in living things-the focus of medical reflection. Medicine's role in developing these ideas of nature as soul in what Don Bates calls Phase I of the Western Intellectual Tradition (Antiquity to the Renaissance), had a crucial impact on the Scientific Revolution, or what Bates refers to as Phase II of the Western Intellectual Tradition. The centrality of medicine to the evolving concept of mechanism truly makes it "the soul of science."