- Theorie der Medizin: Dialoge zwischen Grundlagenfächern und Klinik
This volume presents twelve essays by biomedical and clinical researchers as a dialogue between the basic and applied sciences that have defined modern medicine. The double title of the collection is both ambitious and ambiguous: it suggests that this is a dialogue among discipline-oriented theories that might eventually contribute to a theoretical synthesis—a theory of medicine. But Axel Bauer, a physician, historian of medicine, and ethicist who is speaking as both editor and contributor, is quick to concede that such a synthesis is neither at hand nor even a reasonable concept. His true objective seems to lie in giving an equal hearing to a wide range of voices that contribute to the current body of knowledge and practice of medicine, from pathology to biometrics, pain theory, and public health, to semiotics.
The result is both predictable and occasionally fascinating. As is usual in collections of essays that were originally presented to live audiences—here, a series of lectures to medical and medical-history students—not all authors did or could follow the integrating epistemological perspective invoked in the two introductory chapters. Newer fields like biometrics clearly find it more difficult to fit into a classical perspective of medicine and the meaning of theory than do traditional disciplines like public health (here restricted to hygiene). Representatives of disciplines like pathology can examine a whole century of innovation, modification, and adaptation. For the teacher of anatomy and cell biology, the question of how to ensure a balance between the exploding subdisciplines and clinical education is more important than the Platonic difference between science and techne\. [End Page 188]
Behind these differences of outlook and perspective, this collection offers a fascinating glimpse at the outcomes, among the higher reaches of the German academe, of the last fifty years of educational transitions and political divisions. All contributors were at best in their teens when the war ended in 1945. Two-fifths studied or worked in the United States, but the lead article is an impressive contribution by Heinz David, who spent his medical career at the Charité, the teaching hospital of the Humboldt University, and is one of the rare experts on Rudolf Virchow. The perceived need to incorporate citations from the Greek and German classical canons continues unabated, regardless of specialty. The editor himself was born ten years after the end of World War II, but can still do without a female voice in this theoretical discourse. This being noted, his choice of topics and of contributors displays sureness of touch, considerable erudition, and a judicious sense of balance among disciplines.