Comments on "concepts of function and mechanism in medicine and medical science" and "organs, organisms and disease"

Patrick A. Heelan

pp. 85-93

in: Tristram Engelhardt, Stuart Spicker (eds), Evaluation and explanation in the biomedical sciences, Berlin, Springer, 1975

Abstract

The first great work on the philosophy of medicine is Claude Bernard's An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine ¹ which was written just over one hundred years ago. Bernard was one of the first proponents of an organismic vision of life — neither crudely mechanistic nor vitalistic — that affirmed both the universal validity of physio-chemical laws in the biological domain and the existence of special non-reducible features, physiological in character, of living matter. For Bernard, the body was a "living machine"² not exempted from the laws of physics and chemistry, and a "creative idea" which "expresses itself" through physio-chemical means. Physio-chemical means, he continues, "are common to all natural phenomena and remain mingled, pell-mell, like the letters of the alphabet in a box till a force goes to fetch them, to express the most varied thoughts and mechanisms."³ For Bernard, then, organs were like words, and individual organisms were like sentences. Here Bernard's — and Toulmin's — analysis would stop. Wartofsky, however, would go one step further and say that socio-historical communities of organisms are like languages: diseases which for Bernard and Toulmin then are pathologies of "words;" and "sentences" are for Wartofsky principally pathologies of"languages."