Medicine and culture : proceedings of a historical symposium organized jointly by the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine, London, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, New York / edited by F.N.L. Poynter.

Date:
1969
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Medicine and culture : proceedings of a historical symposium organized jointly by the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine, London, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, New York / edited by F.N.L. Poynter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    306/336 (page 296)
    things with the mind. When Gailileo - we shall certainly have to bring Dr. Crombie in any moment - and the early people in his time had abstracted the fundamental things from the secondary qualities, don't worry about the colour and the smell, etc., just think of it as a mass, I should have thought that that was highly speculative. The fact that it works doesn't matter. I should have thought it was all highly speculative at the beginning. All this brings us to the fact of how we would like to refer to the early Chinese systems of thought ; they are very systematic. We would rather think of them as primitive science rather than modern science, and rather than metaphysical or even speculative as such. It's just a matter of explaining our point of view really; it wasn't meant critically in the slightest degree. Dr. Lu points out that one reason why we shouldn't like to call these classifications speculative is that they were based on a certain amount of experience. I don't know whether Dr. Crombie would like to come in. chairman : If I may, I propose to follow the course I suggested earlier. That each member of the Symposium should speak for about five or six minutes now and say just what they like, if it has any relevance to the subject. I think Dr. Crombie you were going to speak about the paper. Perhaps you could combine both. crombie : Certainly. About this matter of metaphysical, it seems to me first of all a question of the use of words. It seems to me some what improper to use the word metaphysical in this context. I would take Dr. Needham's side over this. It seems to me more generally that what Dr. Needham is dealing with is the study of scientific thought, medical thought and so on, and all study of scientific thought occurs within a system of beliefs and these beliefs arise within the Culture; they belong to the culture. I think this is one of the difficulties of speaking in the language of one culture about another culture. I think I should now move on to the more general remarks that Lord Cohen has asked us for . . . keele : Before you go on, sir, may I ask what is the correct word? crombie: No , I can't do that. The system of beliefs, if you like. Metaphysics in Greece was a particular word which is attached to theology. It is a study of physics in a special way, it tells one about what exists. This is a fundamental problem in the philosophy of science, of course. This is worked out as a very logical and critical exercise in the study of this problem and is developed as a continuing problem in the West, but apparently not so in China; they just did not have the interest in this kind of thought. In more general terms, I think that what has struck me most about this Symposium is the fact that we have been considering problems in the terms of explanation, in the terms of what the medical man expects to find.