201For well over a century physicians have celebrated ceremonial occasions
by recounting how medicine escaped superstition and empiricism to be-
come scientifi c. The story almost invariably begins with Hippocrates and
recounts the achievements of such scientifi c worthies as Andreas Vesalius,
William Harvey, Rudolf Virchow, Claude Bernard, Joseph Lister, Robert
Koch, and the nonphysician Louis Pasteur. “For many centuries the prac-
tice of medicine was far closer to the arts of the primitive magician than to
the logic of the scientist,” declared one clinician in a typical narrative. “For-
tunately, genius broke through the barriers of superstition and tradition
sporadically; Hippocrates denied the divine etiology of disease, Vesalius
dared look beneath the skin, Harvey turned attention from morphology
to dynamics, and Claude Bernard expounded the experimental method
... Then, gradually, science began to invade the wards.”^1 Although some
speakers grumbled about the extent to which “science” had eclipsed the
“art” of medicine, most welcomed scientifi cally informed practice.
Until recently historians of both science and medicine typically por-
trayed medicine prior to the advent of “scientifi c medicine” in the late
nineteenth century as more of a craft than a science. Although the term
frequently went unexplained, its use left the strong impression that medi-
cine remained unscientifi c until Pasteur and Koch rescued it from its lowly
state. And even then the status of medicine—and its historians—remained
in dispute. In the mid- 1930s George Sarton and Henry Sigerist, the god-
fathers of the history of science and the history of medicine, respectively,
CHAPTER 8Science and Medicine
Ronald L. Numbers