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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."

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-1769-5_6

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