Contemporary medical practice lays claim to ever-increasing scientificity, as evidenced by the growing use of laboratory tests and imaging techniques at the expense of physical contact with the patient's body. Evidence-based medicine is the theory underpinning this practice. It is the most recent version of the lesion-based model on which contemporary clinical practice has been based since the last third of the 18th century. Just as William Cullen defined neuroses on the basis of patients presenting neurological disorders for which no lesion was found at autopsy, today we find that at least a third of internal medicine patients present medically unexplained symptoms, attesting to the persistence of conversion hysteria and the futile nature of efforts to eliminate it.