“Doctors,” Voltaire wrote, “are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing.” The pivotal word in this scathing description is know. The discipline of medicine concerns the manipulation of knowledge under uncertainty. Abstract away the smell of rubbing alcohol and bleach; forget the adjustable beds and ward signs and the gleaming granite of hospital lobbies; erase, for a moment, the many corporeal indignities of a man in a blue cotton gown in a room or the doctor trying to heal him— and you have a discipline that is still learning to reconcile pure knowledge with real knowledge. The “youngest science” is also the most human science. It might well be the most beautiful and fragile thing that we do.
— Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science
Bologna 