ABSTRACT
Within a conceptualization concerning the health-disease process as a whole (which systematically correlates its biological, psychological, social and historical aspects), it becomes very difficult to find something in the universe involving humankind, without any direct or indirect relationship with that vital process. This fact had expanded medicine toward a very extensive and complex field of knowledge and practices. Just considering it from the scientific perspective, different and opposing acquaintances and research methods vie with each other, equally claiming their own worth and stature within science. Because of all this and from its origin, allopathic medicine has required the assistance and support of philosophy and, in particular, from one specific branch: epidemiology. Nevertheless, since Bacon's empiricism (17th century) and, above all, since Comte's positivism (19th century), there had predominated until now (Piaget) a scientific current which was the enemy of philosophical thinking. In spite of the fact that it constituted, in itself, an epistemological position, being generalized also among biomedical scientists, there is in medicine at least disdain against the philosophy of science. Nevertheless, it is objectively indispensable. So, the present essay is presented in this sense, through the analytic characterization of the prototypic epistemologies and their relationships with medicine throughout history.
