NAVIGATION

Modern medicine is still a mixture of art, developing the skills to deal with people, and science using the latest technological advances to enhance the care of the patient. Medicine as a practice has been built up over the centuries and today’s general medical practitioner is the descendant of both the ancient Greek doctor and teacher, Hippocrates and the Greek priests of Aesculapius. The doctor’s ability to diagnose disease starts with his taking a history from the patient which is a practice that stems from these ancients and has nothing to do with scientific method. His clinical diagnostic methods do belong to the age of science, but are the development of systems worked out much later in the 18th and 19th centuries. By the 20th century these procedures had become old fashioned and were supplanted by more modern techniques. New methods of pathological and chemical diagnosis have also evolved more rationally and less empirically based than the medieval practice of urinoscopy, but occupying an equivalent position in medical science. Medicine continually evolves and in due course the innovations of today will be themselves largely succeeded. Only the treatment of the patient and the manner of care will still reach back through history to the practice of the ancients.