 
                         20051001.00

     I've been looking at two books by Thomas S. Kuhn, a man
about my age of whose career, if I were not too old for envy,
I might be envious.  Kuhn, a protege of James B. Conant,
started out in mathematical physics, then switched to the
history of science, flourished in I.B. Cohen's and Everett
Mendelssohn's department at Harvard, was a Junior Fellow, and
went on to a professorship in California.  Of his two books,
which I received from Klemens, one is about the Copernican
Revolution, a book which much impresses me, because it
contains a lot of astronomy which I feel I should have
learned long ago, but didn't,  and worse, which I still have
some difficulty understanding. The second book is  called
"The Nature of Scientific Revolutions", and this book I find
less intimidating because its faults are so obvious.

     I have for years been impressed with the circumstance
that physicians keep making the same mistakes over and over
again, that they do not learn from history, because medicine
has no history.  The only thing deemed of value is the
latest.  The profession lives from gimmick to gimmick,
electronic or pharmacological.

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Copyright 2005, Ernst Jochen Meyer
