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Erwin O. Hirsch, MD
Medical College of Wisconsin Milwaukee

JAMA. 1995;274(20):1587.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—In connection with Dr Eisenberg's¹ thoughtful analysis of the problems facing medicine today, I wonder whether it may not be useful to draw a distinction between medicine, a body of knowledge, and the practice of medicine, the application of this knowledge. The body of knowledge as set forth in any textbook of medicine can be properly called a science because it is organized to reflect a theory and because it has been acquired by scientific methods. The theory is the one formulated by Virchow over a century ago that states illness is the manifestation of changes in the structure or function of organs, tissues, and cells; the scientific methods range from the systematic analysis of the relationship between clinical observations and pathological findings to test-tube experiments.

It is the pride of the practice of medicine that it is based not merely on a body of knowledge . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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