Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Once upon a time, I happened to speak at the Faculty of Medicine of
University “La Sapienza” in Rome, and I perceived a sort of astonishment
written in the faces of my colleagues when I said that - not only in ancient
times, but also in the contemporary world - medical practice is the mother
of all sciences. They thought that my statement wanted just to capture their
benevolence.
Without the pretense of a detailed exegesis of DeMauro's thought, we can certainly
affirm that the his assertion is closely related to the author's conception of culture.
In search of a definition is important not to isolate specific aspects of various and
different components (artisanal, technical, applicative and theoretic, etc) but to con-
sider the complex network created by all these viewpoints, in order to shed a more
global light on the problem to be afforded. In this sense, the fine interplay between
rigor and morality, measuring and experience that is Medicine poses unique and
specific dilemmas, more complex than the ones of any other science: is this the
intimate sense in which DeMauro's “medical practice” can be really considered so
crucial.
Medicine, however, besides being “the mother of all sciences” is certainly also a
science in its own right: but which kind of science? It is a science in the sense that
it is just a definite version of applied biology (or, more specifically, the combination
of applied biochemistry, applied genetics and the likes)? Can it be considered also
as an
autonomous
science, instead of just an applied science? But if we shift our
perspective toward this more independent stance, some challenging questions sud-
denly appear. Medicine is clearly a science that deals with classes and species, but
it is also and foremost the science of a single individual - the patient. This approach
shows medicine as something epistemologically more similar to Cosmology than to
Physics, in the sense that it is the science of a
unicum
. To add a further compli-
cation, the cornerstone scientific notion of “repeatable experiment under controlled
conditions” is in this instance quite difficult to apply. And this not just in one, but in
two different senses: as for the first, it is clearly not possible to do any kind of proper
experiment, as following the usual framework is not conceivable; furthermore even
for the very limited class of experiments for which a sort of repetition is possible,
it remains elusive to establish the same identical boundary conditions when the ex-
periment is repeated. The
ceteris paribus
paradigm is foiled by complexity in both
the exogenous (environment, medical personnel) and endogenous (conditions of the
patient, interaction between processes and therapies) department. The latter aspect
makes our situation, perhaps, also worse than the one existing in Cosmology: in our
case we cannot fully isolate the different aspects. There is a very strong interaction
between different levels (psychological, mental, genetic, functional, etc) besides the
one between the individual and the environmental context.
4.3
Fuzziness and the Art and Science of Medicine
The context we have outlined in the previous section brings us to discuss the many-
faceted concepts of precision (and lack thereof), numerical accuracy and more
