Greaves D
J Med Ethics. 1979 Mar;5(1):29-32. doi: 10.1136/jme.5.1.29.
The failure of Western medicine to deal with many of the problems it is currently facing has led to an awareness of the need for a fundamental reappraisal. The way in which medical concepts derived from the nineteenth century have brought technical medical advances in this century and the alliances that medicine has made with statistics and more recently the social sciences, have prevented a questioning of medicine's underlying assumptions. Thus, despite a number of critical initiatives from both within and outside medicine, there has been no coherent development to seriously confront the question 'what is medicine?'. It is suggested that the basis for such a development depends on the return to a philosophical questioning of our conceptual understanding of disease, a subject which has largely been ignored during the past hundred years.
西医在应对当前所面临的诸多问题时的失败，已引发了人们对进行根本性重新评估的必要性的认识。源自19世纪的医学概念在本世纪带来了医学技术进步，以及医学与统计学乃至最近与社会科学所建立的联盟，这些都阻碍了对医学基本假设的质疑。因此，尽管医学内部和外部都有一些批判性举措，但对于“医学是什么？”这一问题，却没有连贯一致的发展来认真应对。有人认为，这种发展的基础取决于回归对我们关于疾病的概念性理解进行哲学质疑，而这一主题在过去百年里在很大程度上被忽视了。
