ABSTRACT
In reducing Kepler’s laws to his laws, Newton goes beyond refining Kepler’s discovery; he provides an explanation for Kepler’s laws. In 1851, Hungarian obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis noticed something distressing in his obstetric clinic in Vienna General Hospital—a leading hospital in Europe and a center of medical education. Jacques Louis David’s 1788 painting of the French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier and his brilliant wife Marie Anne Pierrette Paulze, who assisted him in his research. Contemporary theories of explanations largely fall into two camps: explanations are either mind-independent or they are mind-dependent/epistemic. Medicine tells stories and the authors might even insist that these stories are “true”; nevertheless, the worth of the stories is ultimately grounded in their abilities to make people feel better both physically and epistemically. As an aside, medicine often implicitly assumes that citing a cause suffices for an explanation.
