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A MOMENT OF REFLECTION

      https://doi.org/10.1142/9789812830074_0007Cited by:0 (Source: Crossref)
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      Abstract:

      There is no conclusion to this brief account of the epic evolution of the history of medicine. At the very moment where we halt, vast new vistas are opening up as medical science pushes the frontiers of knowledge forward. The most rapid advances in medicine have occurred within the life time of today's doctors.

      In medicine as in science, the pure and the applied have progressed together over the years, the pure fertilising the applied with ideas, and the applied often providing the pure with the physical apparatus to help in the next intellectual leap forward. One may say that medical science is no more than the body of knowledge which is always being added on to by scientists, through controlled and reproducible observations. Medicine is a natural as well as social science, in the sense that it is concerned with human beings and is directed more immediately towards human welfare than any other natural science.

      Modern science and medicine have immensely improved the lot of humanity. However, humanity can make use of these unimaginable powers for good or evil, but humanity has a major responsibility to insure that the world is safe for now and its future generations. Science and medicine are not standing still, and who can say how far the molecular biology, the chemistry or the physics of the future will have to adopt conceptions much more organicist than the atomic and mechanistic which have so far prevailed? Who knows what further developments of the psychosomatic conception in medicine's future advances may necessitate? In all such ways the thought complex of traditional Chinese sciences may yet have a much greater part to play in the future state of all sciences than might be admitted if science today was all that science will ever be.

      Always we must remember that things are more complex than they seem, and that wisdom was not born with us, nor is it the property of any particular civilisation or people. The march of humanity in the study of Nature, of which humans are a part, is one single enterprise.