Despite the seemingly rock-solid achievements of some individual sciences, science as a whole is affected by storms that may reshape it within a generation. Books such as Devlin’s Goodbye Descartes a title that no reputable scientist would have thought sensible until recently are now almost commonplace. They all declare that we are reaching, or have reached, a stage at which the scientific consensus worked out in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries by Descartes himself, Bacon, Galileo and Newton has taken us nearly as far as we can go unless it is radically revised. The physicists probably started the whole trouble with their discovery that matter, space and time are not at all as the ‘century of genius’ (i.e. the 17th century), building on classical Greek foundations, had taken them to be. Medicine, in so far as it is an applied science, is unlikely to escape these storms; and one direction in which disturbances may be brewing lies in the newly fashionable area of consciousness studies. Apart from a brief flowering at the end of the 19th century, this field had lain almost entirely fallow until about twenty years ago.
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Comment in: Diseases of consciousness. [J R Soc Med. 1997]
Source: Nunn CM. Diseases of consciousness? J R Soc Med. 1997 Jul;90(7):400-1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1296387/