Medicine and Science

Modern Western medicine is based on what Western physicists call the 'mechanical' view of the world. This is deeply rooted in the seventeenth-century philosophical ideas of Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and the scientific theories of Isaac Newton (1642-1727).

Both men saw the Universe as a great machine, perfect, mechanical and governed by precise mathematical laws of space and time. In medicine also, the body was treated as a machine, made up of component parts that could be taken apart and pm together again.

 Disease was seen as a breakdown of the machine and the doctor's task was primarily to remove the disease, and if necessary also the infected part, sometimes replacing it with an artificial one or even (in recent times) a 'second-hand' one.

Descartes held that mind and matter were totally separate, thereby allowing - for the first time - research into the functions of the body to be totally separated from research into the mind.

The mind was considered to be unresearchable, and so was ignored by scientists, who left its mysterious realms to philosophers, until the end of the nineteenth century at least.

According to Descartes there was 'nothing included in the concept of the body that belongs to the mind, and nothing in the mind that belongs to the body'.