Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

This power of modern Western science brought a sense of safety
from feelings “unpredictability and impotence in the face of a
mysterious, possibly hostile universe” (258). Out of this, it
brought a sense of control and authority over that “observable
world” of Weil’s. In the end, it brought Certainty. Because of
Newton and those investigators and theorists like Copernicus,
Galileo, Vesalius, and Descartes before him, Western Science had
brought to the world a Certainty heretofore not known, because
it was founded not in faith alone but in numbers – again, “fixed
and immutable,” “absolute and unshakeable” - or so it would
seem. And the basic perspective upon reality and “truth” of
Western Science and the ideology formulated from it would see
what was possibly its purest articulation with Western Medicine,
which, curiously and with little coincidence, saw its greatest
advances and the dawn of its very own “modern” age during that
same time that witnessed the birth of Current-Traditional
Rhetoric: the nineteenth century.
I have to admit that I have been “stuck,” for lack of a
better word, upon the similarities I believed I have witnessed
between Western Medicine and Current-Traditional Rhetoric since
I wrote my Master’s thesis so many years ago now. Medicine had
already begun rising from out of the shadows of devil and witchobsessed
superstition by the time of the Renaissance and, by the
eighteenth century, a new rational approach to illness and
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