ABSTRACT
Of the two central characters in our story, the modern doctor and the modern patient, the doctor comes on stage in the period between 1880 and 1950. We will consider as “modern” the men who graduated from medical school in these years, because it was at school that all these new ideas were learned. The essence of their “modernity” was the doctors’ ability correctly to diagnose disease: not to cure it, but to recognize what it was the patient had.
