What is Internal Medicine?

I’m trudging through the third edition of Sapira’s Art and Science of Bedside Diagnosis...On page 7 I found this definition of Internal Medicine:

"(1) (Obsolete) That nonsurgical medical specialty concerned with clinical diagnosis and scientific therapy. Previously a secondary-care consultant specialty, it underwent crisis by lysis in the late 1960s; (2) (contemporary) a biopolitical consortium of balkanized tertiary nonsurgical subspecialties, which, oxymoronically, claim it to be a primary care specialty."

Tomado de Notes from Dr. RW