ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author aims to adopt four divisions—or epochs—in the evolution of medicine, namely, instinctive, theological, metaphysical, and scientific. Observation has legitimately been able to demonstrate three different tendencies in medicine for explaining everything: the first by supernatural powers, the second by forces or factitious entities, and the third by natural phenomena. These ways of thinking are mixed together in various proportions, the epochs merging into each other. Thus even today there are medical theologians and metaphysicians, as well as representatives of instinctive medicine—that which existed in the caves of Troglodytes, and will persist until the generalization of learning has attained a higher level than it has so far reached. The metaphysical manner of interpreting things occupies the greatest place in the history of medicine. A series of precise and positive data have changed the purely characteristic conditions of medicine as an art and have penetrated the doors of clinical medicine.
