Miracle cure: the story of antibiotics

These essays prefigure many of Ryle's later ideas on "social medicine". For Ryle, the biomedical sciences had narrowed the scope ofmedicine in an era when it most needed to expand its horizons, epistemology, and aims. He was later to recruit the methods of the modern social sciences to enhance his idea of clinical practice as the natural history of disease in order to place it on a preventive basis. Social medicine, in Ryle's schema, would deal with the health of populations as well as restore the health of "whole" individuals. Ryle's holistic medicine was controversial in its day and remained so. As Michael Shepherd points out in his excellent Introduction to the book, contemporary medicine needs to recapture something of Ryle's philosophical approach in order to face its current challenges. The moment seems appropriate to reflect upon the messages of John Alfred Ryle.