First, I distinguished and analyzed three parts of the general nature of medicine: (1) medicine as science (the type of scientific knowledge medical practice requires and is based on); (2) medicine as practical and technical art, as best exemplified in surgery; and (3) medicine (the medical professions) as entailing knowledge of, and moral commitment to, the end of medicine, of which Aristotle recognized so insightfully that it is constitutive of the essence of medicine. (The present work sought to overcome the all too narrow concept and definition of the end of medicine in terms of health alone, showing that that there are at least five immanent and two transcendent goods medicine ought to serve as its proper ends.)