When I started to study philosophy in parallel to my enrollment in medical school (which was still possible back then), philosophy of medicine functioned for me as token that it would be possible to combine my different areas of interest. Karl Rothschuh's Concepts of Medicine provided important first insights how the empirical and epistemological heterogeneity of medicine could be systematized. However, I came too late with my visit to Münster and encountered a purely academic attempt to classify and restructure medicines range of practices by the rigid standards of traditional philosophy of science; that was how philosophy of medicine had established itself as an esoteric specialty at that time.
Today Rothschuh's conceptual system looks similarly schematic to me and I wonder why he did not engage more closely with the then new trends in history and philosophy of science in France, England, and America, given that personally he was well connected to this debate. However, his historical approach to questioning medicine and its philosophy remain formative for me when I had the opportunity to collect and edit a volume on medicine for the series "Philosophy of the Present" for the German publishing house Fischer Taschenbuch. While doing my PhD in neuroscience in London, where the Welcome Institute for History of Medicine was still the mecca of history of medicine, I worked at Imperial College where I discovered science and technology studies as vibrant and intellectually stimulating field. I had heard of Ludwik Fleck during my earlier studies with Lothar Schäfer in Hamburg and I edited Anatomies of Medical Knowledge as a test case connecting these two lines of thought and bypassing, by enlarge, philosophy of medicine. After giving historical epistemology and science and technology studies first priority I finally did write a Philosophy of Medicine.
Since then, however, the topics and questions have never left me; some of them contributed more to the contemporary history of medicine, others more to historiographical or contemporary-diagnostic works.
See also:
- Contemporary History of Medicine
- History of Science and Historical Epistemology
- Diagnosis of Time
