Interpretation and dialogue

medicine as a moral discipline

Richard Zaner

pp. 147-168

in: Steven Crowell (ed), The prism of the self, Berlin, Springer, 1995

Abstract

Whether medicine is understood as a disciplined craft or technology, an artful exercise of informed reasoning, or a diagnostic science-or all of these—one thing is perfectly obvious: it abounds in interpretations, as diverse in some ways as are the data about which physicians reason and with which they work. In modern medicine as in its history, it is equally true that medicine is characterized at any time by certain usages, some of which seem to be "generative ideas," in Suzanne Langer's term (1942: 1–5)—central beliefs or commitments about the nature of the discipline itself, as well as about medical knowledge and its relation to practice, what constitutes illness or health, what patients are, and the doctor-patient relationship, etc.