This is a very astute observation and one with which I agree. Physics has "theoretical physicists" trying to make sense of experiments. I don't think medicine has the same well organized gang of people. On top of that, most people that pursue the medical field aren't that good at Mathematics which hinders their ability to create and test models.
This is a good point, Nanonug, and one which I have often pondered on myself.
To restate your point: there is a distinct division in physics: there are the
experimental physicists, who set up laboratory experiments (sometimes with billion dollar budgets) in order to make specific observations, measurements and tests on the laws of nature, and on the behaviors of physical world; and then there are the
theoretical physicists who, with nothing more costly than a pencil and paper, sit down at their desks trying to develop theories that explain how the physical world actually works (with of course the help of the data derived from experimental physics).
The experimentalists are doers that are at home in the lab. The theoreticians are the thinkers that are at home in a library or any place they are left alone to engage in deep thinking. These are quite different personalty types, and each prefers their own domain.
In the medical, biochemical and microbiology fields, there does not seem to be this distinction between the doers and the thinkers, as far as I am aware. I personally don't have any direct experience of this academic area, but from what I can work out, in the biological sciences, most people are primarily experimentalists that work in labs, with some of these guys moonlighting as theoreticians.
Because there seem to be few dedicated theoreticians in the biological sciences, this means there are not enough people sitting down with pencil and paper, devising new theoretical models that explain biochemical mechanisms and disease etiologies.
Though it has to be said that biology is a different beast to physics. In the history physics, time and time again, very complex looking phenomena are often eventually boiled down to a startlingly simple and beautiful mathematical equation that, remarkably, captures all the facets of the phenomenon. In physics, complex phenomena arise out of a underlying substrate of beautifully simple laws.
However, in the biological sciences, even the underlying substrate itself seems complex. You don't seem to get many occasions in the history biology where a complex phenomenon is boiled down to a simple equation or law that you can print on a T-shirt. In fact, often the reverse: when you try to understand a simple concept in biology, like say that of heredity, instead of boiling down to a simple equation, it explodes into something extremely detailed and convoluted, like the complex science of genetics.