History of Science and Engineering Annotation << Back Mechanisms of the Scientific Revolutions in Medicine in XVII–XVIII Centuries Stochik A.M. Zatravkin S.N. The article presents the results of the studies based on the application of the concept of the structure and dynamics of scientific knowledge developed by V.S. Stepin to the analysis of the history of the 17th–18th century medicine. The scientific revolution in the 17th-century medicine was of a globally-disciplinary nature and involved changes in all of the bases of the medical science of the galenism period. Its mechanism was a «paradigm inoculation» of new methodological principles of experimental science originated from astronomy. The crucial role in the transmission of these methodological principles of scientific experience into medicine was alloted to S. Santorio, W. Harvey, V. Plempius. The works by Descartes provided the revision of philosophical foundations of medical science and the emergence of a new picture of reality in the 17th-century medicine based on the concepts of kinetic mechanics. The adoption of Cartesian ideas of kinetic mechanics and their wide-spread occurrence in medicine were connected with the development and implementation of iatrophysical teachings (G. Borelli, L. Bellini) and the teachings of the corpuscular iatrochemistry (F. Sylvius and others). The scientific revolution in the 18th-century medicine was of a locally-disciplinary nature and involved changing the picture of reality. Its mechanism was the negotiation of the intradisciplinary crisis which prevailed in the medicine of the 90s of the XVIIth century and associated with the realization of the impossibility to explain all life processes of a healthy and diseased human body solely on the basis of Cartesian notions of «collisions» of particles devoid of any specific property. The recovery was found by supplementing the Cartesian picture of reality with the ideas of the existence of «internal living forces» specific to the human organism. With regard to natural bodies in general these ideas were introduced in the European science of modern times by Leibniz and Newton. The introduction of the ideas of dynamism in medicine is associated mainly with the activity of A. Pitcairne, F. Hoffmann, E. Stahl, G. Baglivi, H. Boerhaave and A. Haller who presented experimental evidence of the existence of powers inherent only in living organisms. The recognition of the ideas of dynamism by the majority of the medical community led to a fundamental revision of ideas about the disease, the emergence of new approaches to the study, the diagnosis, the treatment and prevention of human diseases and marked in medicine the final approval of a new picture of reality, which cannot be reduced to a mechanical one. Keywords: scientific revolution; the picture of reality; medicine; Galen; Galileo; Harvey; Descartes; iatrophysics; iatrochemistry; Leibniz; Newton; Stahl; Haller. Contacts: E-mail: zatravkine@mail.ru Pp. 34-53.