The Philosophy of Disease [Hardcover]

Disease is everywhere. Everyone experiences disease, everyone knows somebody who is, or has been diseased, and disease-related stories hit the headlines on a regular basis. Many important issues in the philosophy of disease, however, have received remarkably little attention from philosophical thinkers.

This book examines a number of important debates in the philosophy of medicine, including 'what is disease?', and the roles and viability of concepts of causation, in clinical medicine and epidemiology. Where much of the existing literature targets conceptual analyses of health and disease, this book provides the reader with an insight into these debates, and develops plausible alternative accounts. The author explores a range of related subjects, discussing a host of interesting philosophical questions within clinical medicine, pathology and epidemiology. In the second part of the book, the author examines the concepts of causation employed by clinicians and pathologists, how one should classify diseases, and whether the epidemiologist's models for inferring the causes of disease are all they're cracked up to be.

The Philosophy of Disease outlines a history of the philosophy of epidemiology. It provides a hybrid naturalist/constructivist account of disease and disease individuation and looks at causal concepts with respect to different aspects of public health to show that Smart's conceptual analysis can play a prescriptive and a descriptive role.Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Introduction
1. The Concept of Disease in Clinical Medicine
The maximally value laden conception  Rachel Cooper on disease
The pure statistical conception
The frequency and negative consequences approach, and the line-drawing problem
The etiological account of function, and disease as harmful dysfunction
Disease as harmful function  'drawing the linelÃ,