From: Steve Davies (steve365@btinternet.com)
Date: Sun Mar 02 2003 - 06:16:58 MST
Joh Clark wrote
> Medicine has to be the most disappointing science, it's been around for
> thousands of years but until about 1900 did more harm than good with its
> quack "cures". Even today there hasn't been a really major breakthrough
> since the discovery of Penicillin and that was more than half a century
ago.
> It's surprising too; we know vastly more biology than we did then but for
> some reason can't translate it into cures.
I think that's more pessimistic than you need to be. The mistake is thinking
that "medicine has been around for thousands of years". In one sense clearly
that's true - Doctoring/surgery has been around for that time. However
medicine as a science has only been around since about the time of Pasteur.
Since it has to deal with the subject matter of several disciplines (Human
biology, molecular biology, sociology, biochemistry, the biology of bacteria
and viruses to name just a few) it's not surprising development has been
relatively slow. There are a number of medical traditions in the various
civilisations up to the mid19th century (the 'western' one is basically
Galen plus some input from the Arabs) none of which are particularly
effective. When you compare the effectiveness of scientific medicine to the
traditional models, you become more optimistic, I feel.
Steve Davies (Steve5@btinternet.com)
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