The Hermeneutics of Medicine and the Phenomenology of Health

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Fredrik Svenaeus

   Pages 1-9

3. The Clinical Encounter

   • Fredrik Svenaeus

   Pages 11-57

4. The Phenomenology of Health and Illness

   • Fredrik Svenaeus

   Pages 59-118

5. The Hermeneutics of Medicine

   • Fredrik Svenaeus

   Pages 119-175

6. Summary

   • Fredrik Svenaeus

   Pages 177-181

7. Back Matter

   Pages 183-203

   PDF

Fredrik Svenaeus' book is a delight to read. Not only does he exhibit keen understanding of a wide range of topics and figures in both medicine and philosophy, but he manages to bring them together in an innovative manner that convincingly demonstrates how deeply these two significant fields can be and, in the end, must be mutually enlightening. Medicine, Svenaeus suggests, reveals deep but rarely explicit themes whose proper comprehension invites a careful phenomenological and hermeneutical explication. Certain philosophical approaches, on the other hand - specifically, Heidegger's phenomenology and Gadamer's hermeneutics - are shown to have a hitherto unrealized potential for making sense of those themes long buried within Western medicine.
Richard M. Zaner, Ann Geddes Stahlman Professor of Medical Ethics, Vanderbilt University

• Edmund Husserl
• Hans-Georg Gadamer
• Interpretation
• Martin Heidegger
• Medical Ethics
• Paul Ricoeur
• Paul Ricœur
• body
• ethics
• health
• hermeneutics
• medicine
• phenomenology
• philosophy
• philosophy of medicine

• Department of Health and Society, University of Linköping, Sweden

  Fredrik Svenaeus

Policies and ethics