Main description:

This is the first monograph to deal with medicine as a form of hermeneutics, now in a thoroughly revised and updated edition, including a whole new chapter on medical ethics. The book offers a comprehensive philosophical argument why good medical practice cannot be curtailed to scientific investigations of the body but is a form of clinical hermeneutics performed by health-care professionals in dialogue with their patients. Medical hermeneutics is rooted in a phenomenology of illness which acknowledges and proceeds from the ill party's bodily feelings, everyday life-world circumstances and self-understanding in aiming to restore health.

The author shows how the works of classical phenomenologists and hermeneuticians - Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur - may be employed to understand how medical diagnosis is enveloped by professional empathy and clinical judgement and developed by scientific investigations of the patient's bodily condition. Health and illness are ultimately considered to be ways of feeling at home or not at home in the world, and such experiences are the starting point of medical hermeneutics when aiming to make best use of scientific knowledge.

The book is aimed at researchers and teachers in philosophy of medicine and medical ethics, and at physicians, nurses and other health-care professionals meeting with patients in ethically complex and challenging situations. Phenomenology and hermeneutics, most often considered as methods belonging to the humanities, are shown to be of vital importance for the understanding of medical practice and ethical dilemmas of health care.

Contents:

Preface. Acknowledgements. Introduction. Part 1: The Clinical Encounter. 1.1. The Rise of a Western Tradition of Medicine. 1.2. The Doctor-Patient Relationship in Pre-Modern Western Medicine. 1.3. The Birth of Modern Medicine. 1.4. Medical Technology. 1.5. The Modern Medical Meeting - Success and Crisis. 1.6. Research on the Clinical Encounter in the Twentieth Century. 1.7. The Social and Cultural Background. 1.8. Philosophy of Medicine. Part 2: The Phenomenology of Health and Illness. 2.1. The Ancient Tradition. 2.2. The Biostatistical Theory - Boorse. 2.3. The Holistic Theory - Nordenfelt. 2.4. Husserl's Phenomenology. 2.5. The Phenomena of Health and Illness. 2.6. Heidegger's Phenomenology. 2.7. Health as Homelike Being-in-the-World. 2.8. Homelikeness as the Rhythm of Life. 2.9. Ability to Act and Attuned Understanding. 2.10. The Lived Body and the Broken Tool. 2.11. Health and Phenomenology - Medicine and Hermeneutics. Part 3: The Hermeneutics of Medicine. 3.1. Explanation and Understanding. 3.2. Hermeneutics - The Choice of Gadamer. 3.3. Medicine and Hermeneutics. 3.4. Ricoeur - Textuality and Narrativity in Medicine. 3.5. The Medical Meeting - Interpretation Through Dialogue. 3.6. Lifeworlds and Horizons in the Medical Meeting. 3.7. The Goal of the Medical Meeting(s). 3.8. The Hermeneutics of Medicine - A Recapitulation and Discussion. 3.9. Between Facts and Norms - Descriptive and Normative Analysis in the Philosophy of Medicine. 3.10. Concluding Remarks and Future Projects To Approach Medical Ethics from Attunement. Summary. References. Index of Names. Index of Subjects.