Abstract

In 1937, John Dewey delivered a lecture to the College of Physicians in Saint Louis. His clear message was that in the practice of medicine it does not suffice for physicians to treat just the body, or to look to just the body for the mechanism of disease. Emphasizing the relational nature of organism-environment, he argued that the physician must treat the whole patient and must therefore consider the environment of the patient. It makes no sense, he suggested, to provide medicine to address a problem with the patient's lungs and then to send him back into the coal mine. As he put it: "We must observe and understand internal processes and their interactions from the standpoint of their interactions with what is...