Abstract

Modern medical anthropology emerged at the end of the 19th century together with the establishment of scientific methods in medicine and it is founded mainly on two dogmata: 1) The conviction that every process in human beings, be it mental or physical, has to be reduced to chemical processes in order to be known; 2) The hypothesis about the autonomous nervous system. Both dogmata put an invincible hindrance between voluntary and involuntary processes in man, preventing communication between consciousness and the body. Consciousness and mind have thus no role to play in medicine, but pure materialism on the other hand implies difficulties for medical ethics. So the patient has to play a double role: the chemical object of the scientific method and the person, to whom the doctor is responsible. The two main dogmata of modern anthropology are no longer valid: Not only philosophy but also the natural sciences have recently produced weighty evidence against them. Facts are emerging in medicine that are contradictory to its established principles