Philosophy must be transported into medicine and medicine into philosophy ”, we read in a treatise from the Hippocratic collection. Transporting philosophy into medicine means bringing medicine out of empiricism, making it rational and scientific. Transporting medicine into philosophy: medicine is born out of a demand for care. There is no gulf between what is (the real) and what should be (the ideal): what is, the crying newborn, calls for what should be. Responding to the demand for care with rational, responsible medicine is to adopt a philosophical position. Being a doctor is not philosophically neutral. The philosophy implicit in the medical act can be summed up in three statements: (1) there is evil (a whole metaphysics); (2) it must be remedied (a whole moral); (3) the efforts to remedy them are paltry (Socratic irony), but that does not prevent them from continuing, for the honour. |