The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Medicine is a comprehensive guide to topics in the fields of epistemology and metaphysics of medicine. It examines traditional topics such as the concept of disease, causality in medicine, the epistemology of the randomized controlled trial, the biopsychosocial model, explanation, clinical judgment and phenomenology of medicine and emerging topics, such as philosophy of epidemiology, measuring harms, the concept of disability, nursing perspectives, race and gender, the metaphysics of Chinese medicine, and narrative medicine. Each of the 48 chapters is written especially for this volume and with a student audience in mind. For pedagogy and clarity, each chapter contains an extended example illustrating the ideas discussed. This text is intended for use as a reference for students in courses in philosophy of medicine and philosophy of science, and pairs well with The Routledge Companion to Bioethics for use in medical humanities and social science courses.

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Medicine is a comprehensive guide to topics in the fields of epistemology and metaphysics of medicine. It examines traditional topics such as the concept of disease, causality in medicine, the epistemology of the randomized controlled trial, the biopsychosocial model, explanation, clinical judgment and phenomenology of medicine and emerging topics, such as philosophy of epidemiology, measuring harms, the concept of disability, nursing perspectives, race and gender, the metaphysics of Chinese medicine, and narrative medicine. Each of the 48 chapters is written especially for this volume and with a student audience in mind. For pedagogy and clarity, each chapter contains an extended example illustrating the ideas discussed. This text is intended for use as a reference for students in courses in philosophy of medicine and philosophy of science, and pairs well with The Routledge Companion to Bioethics for use in medical humanities and social science courses.

How is medical knowledge made? New methods for research and clinical care have reshaped the practices of medical knowledge production over the last forty years. Consensus conferences, evidence-based medicine, translational medicine, and narrative medicine are among the most prominent new methods. Making Medical Knowledge explores their origins and aims, their epistemic strengths, and their epistemic weaknesses. Miriam Solomon argues that the familiar dichotomy between the art and the science of medicine is not adequate for understanding this plurality of methods. The book begins by tracing the development of medical consensus conferences, from their beginning at the United States' National Institutes of Health in 1977, to their widespread adoption in national and international contexts. It discusses consensus conferences as social epistemic institutions designed to embody democracy and achieve objectivity. Evidence-based medicine, which developed next, ranks expert consensus at the bottom of the evidence hierarchy, thus challenging the authority of consensus conferences. Evidence-based medicine has transformed both medical research and clinical medicine in many positive ways, but it has also been accused of creating an intellectual hegemony that has marginalized crucial stages of scientific research, particularly scientific discovery. Translational medicine is understood as a response to the shortfalls of both consensus conferences and evidence-based medicine. Narrative medicine is the most prominent recent development in the medical humanities. Its central claim is that attention to narrative is essential for patient care. Solomon argues that the differences between narrative medicine and the other methods have been exaggerated, and offers a pluralistic account of how the all the methods interact and sometimes conflict. The result is both practical and theoretical suggestions for how to improve medical knowledge and understand medical controversies.

For the last forty years, two claims have been at the core of disputes about scientific change: that scientists reason rationally and that science is progressive. For most of this time discussions were polarized between philosophers, who defended traditional Enlightenment ideas about rationality and progress, and sociologists, who espoused relativism and constructivism. Recently, creative new ideas going beyond the polarized positions have come from the history of science, feminist criticism of science, psychology of science, and anthropology of science. Addressing the traditional arguments as well as building on these new ideas, Miriam Solomon constructs a new epistemology of science.After discussions of the nature of empirical success and its relation to truth, Solomon offers a new, social account of scientific rationality. She shows that the pursuit of empirical success and truth can be consistent with both dissent and consensus, and that the distinction between dissent and consensus is of little epistemic significance. In building this social epistemology of science, she shows that scientific communities are not merely the locus of distributed expert knowledge and a resource for criticism but also the site of distributed decision making. Throughout, she illustrates her ideas with case studies from late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century physical and life sciences. Replacing the traditional focus on methods and heuristics to be applied by individual scientists, Solomon emphasizes science funding, administration, and policy. One of her goals is to have a positive influence on scientific decision making through practical social recommendations.