ABSTRACT
A widely-shared belief about contemporary medicine is that it is well on the way to becoming a science. The sources of this belief are not difficult to locate. The new understanding of disease processes and pharmacological mechanisms contributed by biochemistry and molecular biology, the establishment of therapies on the basis of experimental research, and the development of new modes of acquiring and utilizing precise laboratory data are just a few of the factors that contribute to the sense of medicine's being rapidly transformed into science.
