History of medicine

The seventeenth entry is o empirismo, and in the sentence beside it the word means the surgeon’s hands rather than a school of philosophy: what he had learnt by doing, set against what the book said. English carries that sense too, and a second one, and a third that has fallen away in Portuguese — and the three do not agree with one another. « Empiricism » is entirely respectable: the doctrine that knowledge comes from experience. Its adjective, « empirical », is now about the warmest praise available in a scientific paper — « empirical evidence », « an empirical study ». Against all that stands the old noun. From the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, « an empiric » was a man who practised medicine with no training, going by whatever had seemed to work before; the word was an insult, and it kept company with « a mountebank » and « a quack ». One root therefore judged the same habit twice and in opposite directions: praise when the experience is counted and written up, contempt when it is merely remembered. O empirismo of this list sits on the hinge between the two.