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The Growth of Medical Thought

by LESTER S. KING, M.D. ix + 254 pages. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 1963. $5.50

This engaging and scholarly work might alternatively be titled "The Evolution of the Scientific Method as Exemplified by Selected Personalities and their Philosophies and Experimental Contributions." Beginning with the whims of the gods as etiologies of, and therapeutic agents for, disease we later find the gods and still later, priests prescribing and depending on medicines to cure disease; a change in concept from purely arbitrary and capricious influences to the recognition of certain disease conditions or entities and of reproducible effects of certain drugs and procedures on those conditions. The Hippocratic School (460 B.C.) recognized the importance of accurate, systematic observation and description in dealing with and studying disease, and established Natural Law, as opposed to occult influences, as basic to the correct understanding of disease. Inferences from observations were, in those times, naturally clouded by a lack of the knowledge that was centuries in the future.