ABSTRACT
The social legislation, which marks great progress in the domain of preventive medicine, carries the marks of the medical thought that inspired it. Although the history of medicine represents a history of facts and processes, it should also be in part a biographic history. In the history of medicine, as in the history of art and philosophy, everything is dominated by an eternal and immutable rhythm. Modern medicine, both in the schools and in life, in theory and in practice, is too often subdivided into branches and specialties, into technique and doctrine. If the history of medicine on the one hand should study and teach what medicine was in the past, on the other hand it should range itself with the natural sciences as an experimental science, seeking for that which is permanent.
