Is there any scientific imbalance in the academic education of the physician? Imbalance in physician's education

Abstract

This contribution follows the talk presented during the 2018 International Seminars on Planetary Emergencies, Science for Peace the World Over at the Majorana Foundation in Erice, Sicily.

Over the centuries, medicine has changed the approach to the sick and the disease. Too much focused on the biomedical sciences, it has thus lost the teaching and wisdom inherited from the past.

In this paper, we discuss the need to reacquire ancient knowledge and the importance of the educational role of the Human Sciences and the History of Medicine in the mature training of the modern doctor, as claimed in the early 20th century by the Italian doctor Luigi Mangiagalli.

As asserted by the American psychiatrist George Liebman Engel, a culture that also includes historical information facilitates the understanding of the present and helps to develop an epistemological and critical sense, which is indispensable in age too intoxicated by so many scientific successes and which appears obstinate in her certainties.