Medicine Is a Deontic Discipline

Abstract

Vita brevis, ars longa. This is the Latin translation of the first two lines of an aphorism by Hippocrates which reads: It shows that in Ancient Greece medicine was viewed as an art, téchne. The view persisted in Western medicine until medical research joined the methodology of natural sciences in the late eighteenth century. The judgment soon emerged that medicine had been an unscientific endeavor in the past and had now become a scientific discipline: “Medicine will be a science, or it will not be” (Naunyn 1909, p. 1348).