Contributions of Morphodynamic Models in Medicine

Scientific medicine as we know it today began to emerge at the end of the 18th century, and in the space of a century and a half, it has led to considerable progress in theoretical knowledge of the human body and in the practice of medical care. Yet, despite recent statistical models, it is still very much inspired by the deterministic culture of classical mechanics and biology that it acquired in its early days. Over the past few decades, scientific medicine has seen a growing lack of theoretical modelling for certain common clinical situations, such as complex chronic symptoms and functional disorders. People suffering from such disorders often turn to traditional medicines, which have experienced a boom over the last twenty years. This reveals the depth of the cultural and conceptual gap between the scientific and traditional approaches to health care. However, theoretical models (of complex and non-linear systems, self-organisation, critical phenomena) that are better adapted to the complexity of living organisms have existed for some fifty years, in disciplines (notably physics and applied mathematics) from which medicine has remained distant. We hypothesize that, among these models, René Thom’s catastrophe theory and the morphodynamic current that surrounds it could provide the ‘missing mathematics’ for a rigorous conceptualisation of traditional medicines. We will focus in particular on the place of narrative phenomena in the functioning of cognition, and the applications of morphodynamic theories to the anthropological work of Claude Lévi-Strauss on the articulation of syntactic and semantic structures in mythical narratives, artistic practices and certain traditional therapeutic rites.