INVITED PAPER Medicine between humanism and mechanism* La medicina tra umanesimo e meccanicismo*

*This paper develops the themes of a lecture given in the context of the course on “Il pensiero della cura: i fondamenti del pensiero clinico”, organized by “Medicina e persona ” at the Circolo Culturale di Milano, October 12, 2006. The recent advances in the biomedical sciences and, in par-ticular, the growing relative weight of genetics, have brought about a profound change in the way the medical profession is perceived. The conventional diagnostic ap-proach is increasingly being replaced by analytical determi-nations (above all by means of genetic tests) of the patient’s condition. This has meant that the subjective and personal relationship between physician and patient has become in-creasingly less important: the physician has become more of a specialist that analyses an organism in objective terms and less a person who, on the basis of his knowledge and specif-ic experience, “treats ” both the “state ” of illness and the “feeling ill ” of another person. This change is often justifie