The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [167]
Even the birth of an entire scientific discipline can be due to factors that have little to do with the advance of knowledge. At one time medicine was in direct and unfavourable competition with astrology. As late as 1600 astrology was dominant. Both practices took the form of theoretical systems from which physical effects could be deduced. Both presented themselves as ‘scientific’. Both attempted to explain the working of disease. Medicine relied almost exclusively on bleeding and purging, practices which killed more often than they cured. Few genuinely effective herbal remedies were used by doctors. Compared with this, astrology offered less risk and as good a chance of cure.
Astrology was not regulated by law: anyone could practise. Astrologers catered to the majority, a cross-section of the adult population, principally in country areas. They dealt with general problems defined by their clients, such as pregnancy, adultery, impotence, careers, and so on. In its use of herbal remedies astrology, unlike medicine, was remarkably efficacious. Astrologers were, however, ranked only as craftsmen.
Medicine on the other hand was elitist, predominantly urban, practised by a smaller, more coherent group which was attempting to develop professional forms of regulation and control with the aim of excluding non-members and of better controlling the market. Medicine fitted the contemporary view of the use of knowledge, for although it was largely incapable of curing people, it concentrated on classifying and labelling what was observed. Medicine also complied with the prevailing mode of thought in its concentration on the individual, whereas astrologers conducted few individual sessions.
As science became increasingly institutionalised during the Restoration, medicine more easily fitted its constraints than the anarchic, disorganised practice of astrology. Even then, however, neither discipline could claim to be more efficacious than the other. There were no break-throughs in the ability to cure which would explain the triumph of medicine over astrology. But by 1700 astrology had lost its influence and support. The ‘medical’view of disease had become the accepted model for reasons that had much to do with the ability of the physicians to organise, as well as the fact that their procedures fitted the overall model - and virtually nothing to do with the scientific superiority of their methods over those of astrology.
The whole of Western experimental science had similarly unscientific beginnings. In medieval France, the arrival of advanced Aristotelian logic together with the entire corpus of Hellenistic scientific knowledge led thinkers like Pierre Abelard to approach matters of faith with a new eye. Logic would aid in strengthening faith by making belief comprehensible. Abelard and others used the new dialectic technique to consider contradictory elements in the Bible with a view to reconciling them in some form of synthesis. The logical end to this activity was apparent in the work of the late scholastics, such as Theodoric of Freiburg, Roger Bacon and Bishop Grosseteste, all of whom subjected nature to the same dialectical inquiry. In doing so, they effectively initiated modern scientific reasoning and removed what we would call science from the domain and control of theology. The investigation of nature in the West, then, had its origins in those very attempts to enhance a faith which itself claimed that the investigation of nature was meaningless and without value.
The basic mode of Western thought is itself born of a singular model, developed by the Greeks. Initially, Ionian Greeks found themselves in precarious circumstances that could only be survived through greater understanding and control of some aspects of their uncertain environment. In seeking to dominate their surroundings they took systems such as Egyptian pyramid-building techniques and first adapted them to the needs of navigation, later developing