Divided Legacy, Volume II: The Origins of Modern Medicine: J. B. Van Helmont to Claude Bernard

Divided Legacy (Vols. I-IV) is a history of Western medical philosophy from the time of Hippocrates to the twentieth century, treating it as a unified system of thought rather than a series of fortuitous discovers. Dr. Coulter interprets the development of medical ideas as the product of a conflict between two opposed systems of thought, Empiricism and Rationalism.

This second volume of Divided Legacy analyzes the dispute in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries over the criterion of reliability of medical thought and practice.