Abstract
Throughout this essay it will be my intention to show how current approaches to the concept of medical causality1 derive from man’s historical struggle with disease, the struggle of “human groups” with “pathogenous agents”. It is only within the framework of this historical dialectic that the problem of medical causality attains its true meaning. The question of the cause of an illness is not univocal, but rather possesses different meanings, depending on the social and cultural coordinates in which the question arises. In this sense, it is necessary to distinguish between at least two clearly differentiated periods in the history of the problem of medical causality. The first period, whose paradigm is the “Galenic”, commences with the Hippocratic writings and does not come to an end before the nineteenth century. The other, which slowly developed in medicine during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, derives from Locke’s and especially Hume’s empirical criticism of the Aristotelian doctrine of causality.
The editors wish to thank Michael C. White for the original translation of this essay.
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Peset, J.L. (1993). On the History of Medical Causality. In: Delkeskamp-Hayes, C., Cutter, M.A.G. (eds) Science, Technology, and the Art of Medicine. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 44. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2960-4_5
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