Relevance of Basic Research in the History of Science, Medicine, and Sociology

Out of ignorance of their own methodological basics and restrictions scientists often trespass the legitimate scope of their discipline when denying other sciences the quality of being scientific. New critical approaches from the natural, social, and human sciences, however, reflect the interactions and interdependencies between the researcher and his field of research or between the subject-matter and its constituting framework. Thus, economic science has provided the thesis that the modern subject and its rationality are based on socialization processes in the form of thinking in terms of money, which also significantly determine the nature of modern medicine. Compared to its principles of quantification, standardization, mathematization, reproducibility, materialism and so forth, homeopathy, which had already been founded before the great boom of money economy took place in the nineteenth century, appears to be relatively free from monetary thinking as a qualitative, individualizing, hermeneutic, and teleological medicine.