Book Description

Dr. Moon is physician to the National hospital for diseases of the heart in London, and the first three chapters of the book were originally published in theBritish Medical Journal. Its object is “to show by taking various important epochs in the history of the world, how intimately medicine has been bound up with the current thought and philosophy of the day; how medicine no more than art can work away by itself uninfluenced by the intellectual milieu in which it finds itself" (p. vii). Both in his Preface and at the end of the book, the author, however, refers to a more practical object, which he believes that a study of the interrelations between philosophy and medicine should help to bring about. This is to afford to the physician a broader and truer conception of the purpose of his art, as not merely contributing to the preservation of life, but as furthering the intellectual and moral conditions that make life saner and more satisfying. “The function of the poet, Goethe tells us somewhere, is so to represent things that we may find life tolerable; and the physician, in providing for the health of the body as a sort of indispensable prerequisite, must ever have before his mind that wider outlook which shall enable him to cope with the tædium vitæ, Weltschmerz, maladie de l'infini, or by whatever name we like to call those ills which seem inseparable from the travail of an advanced civilization struggling to a new birth" (p. xi). The book covers practically the whole field of the history of medicine and is consequently sometimes scrappy and disconnected. Its main service is in bringing together from the standard histories of medicine. and thus making more generally accessible to English readers, the main facts regarding the development of medical theory and practice in their relation to the science and philosophy of the different historical periods. The author does not profess to base his work on original research, but he writes pleasantly and clearly; and although he emphasizes the advantages that have come to medicine through turning away from general theories and occupying itself with detailed researches, he yet looks forward to a return to philosophy, a renewal of the sense of the unity of all the rational pursuits of life. —The Philosophical Review, Volume 19 [1910]