ABSTRACT
Medicine has advanced by thinking of illnesses as the afflictions of organisms and, by implication, narrowing the distances between ourselves and other animals; and yet the huge and growing corpus of medical knowledge is itself dramatic evidence of how remote we are from all other animals. The mystery of knowledge and its 'unreasonable effectiveness' in helping people to live longer, healthier and more comfortably. In the West, it was Hippocrates, a mere 2,500 years ago, who more than anyone paved the way for scientific medicine by arguing that the body and its diseases belonged to nature. The paradox, is that the effectiveness of scientific medicine depends on seeing the illness as afflictions of carnal machines. Man is governed by the same physical laws as the cosmos, hence medicine must be an understanding, empirical and rational, of the workings of the body in its natural environment.
