Philosophy and medicine in medieval and renaissance Italy
pp. 29-40
in: Stuart Spicker (ed), Organism, medicine, and metaphysics, Berlin, Springer, 1978Abstract
The efforts to establish a link between philosophy and medicine in which Hans Jonas has taken an active part and which find expression in the title and content of this volume are of rather recent origin. Earlier during this century, and for most of the nineteenth century, medicine and philosophy had been almost completely separated from each other. The two fields coexisted, to be sure, as different subjects within the common framework of the universities, but the teachers and students, the courses and subjects taught, were entirely different. With some notable exceptions such as, for example, Karl Jaspers or Kurt Goldstein, few philosophers have shown a specific interest in medicine and few physicians in philosophy. Even the philosophers of science have focused their attention on mathematics and physics and have taken little notice of medicine and of its specific problems.
