Writings on Medicine / / Georges Canguilhem.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package Pre-2014
• VerfasserIn: Canguilhem, Georges,
• MitwirkendeR: Geroulanos, Stefanos,; Meyers, Todd,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Fordham University Press, , [2022]; ©2012
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Forms of Living
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (116 p.)

At the time of his death in 1995, Georges Canguilhem was a highly respected historian of science and medicine, whose engagement with questions of normality, the ideologization of scientific thought, and the conceptual history of biology had marked the thought of philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, and Gilles Deleuze. This collection of short, incisive, and highly accessible essays on the major concepts of modern medicine shows Canguilhem at the peak of his use of historical practice for philosophical engagement. In order to elaborate a philosophy of medicine, Canguilhem examines paramount problems such as the definition and uses of health, the decline of the Hippocratic understanding of nature, the experience of disease, the limits of psychology in medicine, myths and realities of therapeutic practices, the difference between cure and healing, the organism’s self-regulation, and medical metaphors linking the organism to society. Writings on Medicine is at once an excellent introduction to Canguilhem’s work and a forceful, insightful, and accessible engagement with elemental concepts in medicine. The book is certain to leave its imprint on anthropology, history, philosophy, bioethics, and the social studies of medicine.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Georges Canguilhem’s Critique of Medical Reason -- 1. The Idea of Nature in Medical Theory and Practice -- 2. Diseases -- 3. Health: Popular Concept and Philosophical Question -- 4. Is a Pedagogy of Healing Possible? -- 5. The Problem of Regulation in the Organism and in Society -- Notes -- Index