Evidence
by
Evidence, originally meaning “something clearly visible or obvious,” has only relatively recently become an important term in science, after a long history of use in religion and law. The term began to be used as we use it now in science—to mean empirical data, gathered in accord with scientific method and used to test a hypothesis—in the late nineteenth century, soon after science research began to be sufficiently specialized that people of broad culture began to find it difficult to understand. By 1959, in a lecture at Cambridge that subsequently became an important book, the novelist and physical chemist C. P. Snow famously identified the sciences and humanities as having become “two cultures,” with different vocabularies, assumptions, and interests, and decried the loss of scientists’ interest in the humanities (1959, 1). Medicine has long been considered to be poised between the arts and sciences, and medical practice is often defined as an art based on scientific knowledge. Toward the end of the twentieth century, however, a new term gained traction in medical education and practice: evidence-based medicine (EBM). This approach emphasized practical application of the findings of the best available current research in the field and deemphasized a reliance on...
This essay may be found on page 85 of the printed volume.