The Art and Science of Medicine

Abstract

Just as a mathematician is most fully himself when he is calculating, so a physician is most fully himself, as physician, when he is engaged in medical activity. Medical activity is the actuality of medicine, and both the art and the science are to be defined and understood in relation to it. The art and the science both are as potential activity. It would be a distortion to regard medicine as, say, essentially a science, essentially an understanding of certain natures and relationships, something to which applications were accidental; or to consider it as an art that could be itself without ever coming out of hiding, without becoming active. Both the science and the art would be out of focus without the activity.