202 Numbers
engaged in a public spat over the standing of their respective fi elds. Sar-
ton, envious of the support that The Johns Hopkins University was giv-
ing to Sigerist’s Institute for the History of Medicine and smarting from
Harvard University’s refusal to create a parallel center for him, went out of
his way to denigrate medicine, questioning its status as a “science” and in-
sisting that it would “always remain an ‘art’”: “The historian of medicine
who imagines that he is ipso facto a historian of science,” he added gratu-
itously, “is laboring under a gross delusion.” A peeved Sigerist sniffed that
medicine was neither an “applied science” nor “a branch of science”—and
thus, by implication, was none of Sarton’s business.^2
Since that unfortunate exchange, historians of science have tended
to ignore rather than disparage the history of medicine. For their part,
more and more historians of medicine since the late 1970s have abjured
trying to determine whether medicine was (or is) essentially scientifi c
in favor of attempting to understand what contemporaries meant when
they appealed to science and what they hoped to gain by doing so.^3 This
chapter, which looks at the changing and often contested relationship
of medicine to “natural philosophy” and “science,” follows in this ever-
widening historiographical path. Beginning with the ancient Greeks, who
fi rst concerned themselves with the connection between medicine and
philosophy, it moves quickly to the late Middle Ages, when the status of
medicine as scientia naturalis emerged as an acute issue for professionaliz-
ing physicians. It continues through the modern period, focusing increas-
ingly on the American scene and on the emergence—and meanings and
uses—of “scientifi c medicine.” By closely examining the historical nexus
of science and medicine, I hope to illuminate how healers wrestling with
disease and death conceptualized and categorized their activities.FROM THE BIRTH OF PHILOSOPHY TO THE BIRTH OF THE CLINIC
Since the beginning of human history the formal status of medicine has
been a matter of concern to only a small handful of persons, mostly elite
medical practitioners. The lay public rarely entered discussions, and even
for the overwhelming majority of healers—doctors and priests, drug sell-
ers and midwives—the question remained far removed from their practi-
cal interests. In ancient Greece philosophers and physicians, from Plato
and Aristotle to the co- called Hippocratic writers, considered medicine to
be an art (techne), the possession of which, along with such activities as
cooking, not only distinguished civilized humans from savages but sepa-
rated doctors from unskilled laypersons. A few ancient writers speculated