Current situation in teaching history of medicine at Russian medical universities is limited by the fact that we are dealing with the first year medical students.

In former times history of medicine was taught to the fourth year medical students. So, we had to exclude from our course a lot of information about clinical medicine – our students just can’t understand that. The positive thing is that we changed the focus of our course of history of medicine from medical practice to fundamental science. Now we are trying to teach our students the philosophy and history of science. This is a very radical reform of teaching medical history which contradicts traditional approach.

So, we do it at the I. M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University as an experiment. This experience can be recommended to all medical or technical universities when a special historical subject (history of medicine, history of chemistry, history of biology, etc.) is shown as an integral part of general history of science.

First, we suggest unified periodization of history of medicine and general history of science.

Second, we focus students’ attention on the First scientific revolution in 17th century as a beginning of the era of science in the modern understanding (principle of general theory, reductionism, experimental method, etc.)

Based on that we produced retrospective analysis of religious and philosophical systems which did or did not contribute to the general epistemological stream.