ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a quick historical sketch of the development of a scientific approach within medicine. It describes the rapid growth of various non-clinical disciplines with an interest in health and disease and their assault on the medical citadel. Scientific medicine, medicine based on the application of systematic observation and experiment to the problems of health and disease, can be traced back to the Greeks, the Chinese and beyond. Sociological imperialism is merely one part of a far more general assault upon the psychological, social, organisational, economic, political and ethical aspects of medicine. Despite the huge growth of academic medicine, there is a fundamental sense in which medical research has been, and continues to be, dominated by non-clinical investigations. Although the academy and medicine are now firmly in one another's embrace, it would, however, be naive to assume that we can talk of academic instead of medical dominance.
