Health, Illness and Disease: Philosophical Essays

Description

What counts as health or ill health? How do we deal with the fallibility of our own bodies? Should illness and disease be considered simply in biological terms, or should considerations of its emotional impact dictate our treatment of it? Our understanding of health and illness had become increasingly more complex in the modern world, as we are able to use medicine not only to fight disease but to control other aspects of our bodies, whether mood, blood pressure, or cholesterol. This collection of essays foregrounds the concepts of health and illness and patient experience within the philosophy of medicine, reflecting on the relationship between the ill person and society. Mental illness is considered alongside physical disease, and the important ramifications of society's differentiation between the two are brought to light. Health, Illness and Disease is a significant contribution to shaping the parameters of the evolving field of philosophy of medicine and will be of interest to medical practitioners and policy-makers as well as philosophers of science and ethicists. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Acknowledgements Contributors Introduction Part I: Concepts of health and disease 1. The opposition between naturalistic and holistic theories of health and disease 2. Health and disease: social constructivism as a combination of naturalism and normativism 3. Towards autonomy-within-illness: applying the triadic approach to the principles of bioethics 4. The concept of "mental disorder" Part II: The experience of illness 5. What is phenomenology of medicine? Embodiment, illness and being-in-the-world 6. Beyond the wounded storyteller: rethinking narrativity, illness and embodied self-experience 7. Transitions in health and illness: realist and phenomenological accounts of adjustment to cancer 8. Pain as illness Part III: Illness and society 9. Intersex, medicine and pathologization 10. Stigmatizing depression: folk theorizing and "the Pollyanna Backlash" 11. Doing health: a constructivist approach to health theory 12. Beauty and health as medical norms: the case of Nazi medicine Bibliography Index