Critical Perspectives and Reflections

By: Jim Ward  In April 1977, George L. Engel, then a professor of Psychiatry and Medicine at the University of Rochester, New York, published an article in Science entitled “The Need for a New Medical Model: A Challenge for Biomedicine.” In that article, Professor Engel argued for a more holistic approach to medicine in the western world. Engel believed that medicine had become more and more narrowly focused in its approach: that practitioners were almost entirely focused on a biomedical approach to human health concerns to the virtual exclusion of psychosociological concerns. Patients were increasingly being seen as biological machines, separate from their psychological and social experiences and environments. This tendency, Engel claimed, was even more apparent within the relatively new “medical science” of psychiatry. This latter discipline, he argued, had swallowed the biomedical model hook, line and sinker. This was seen to be problematic by Engel be...