Bates argues that understanding the historical relationship between
medicine and science can help to clarify what science itself is, and exactly how
it differs from other kinds of knowledge. In particular, it is directly relevant to
the so-called “Needham question”: why did the Scientific Revolution happen in
western Europe, even though the East, particularly China, boasted greater
achievements in technology? The question needs to be re-framed: it is not technology
which made the Scientific Revolution, but mechanism. Medicine as a
philosophical inquiry into life-processes, though often dismissed as impervious
to the Scientific Revolution, was actually a driving force for mechanism. This is
because the new mechanism of the 17th century was a fusion of revived ancient
itomism with another ancient style of mechanistic thinking, which Bates called
“organic mechanism” or “technism.” The primary expression or organic mechanism
was in living things—the focus of medical reflection. Medicine’s role in
developing these ideas of nature as soul in what Don Bates calls Phase I of the
Western Intellectual Tradition (Antiquity to the Renaissance), had a crucial
impact on the Scientific Revolution, or what Bates refers to as Phase II of the
Western Intellectual Tradition. The centrality of medicine to the evolving concept
of mechanism truly makes it “the soul of science.”