Overview

The Covid-19 pandemic has shown the need for a fresh look at health and health care. This book offers a philosophical critique of medicine as applied science, but more positively it stresses the social causes of disease and argues for greater equity in the distribution of resources and the benefits of a wider evidence-base for medical treatments. The suggested approach requires a new direction for medical ethics, one which uses the arts and humanities and leads to a revised idea of medical education and medical professionalism. The suggested approach implies a move away from the individualistic philosophy of medicine towards a new aim — community-based quality of life. The achievement of this aim certainly requires an expansion of public health medicine and health promotion but it also requires medical co-operation with the many arts and other community agencies concerned with our health and well-being. Doctors and other health professionals must work through the community rather than on it.

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9781788360593

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'If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that the health of a community is essential to the health of the individual. As Downie says, We are members of one another .' -- Carl Elliott * The Hedgehog Review *

"'If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that the health of a community is essential to the health of the individual. As Downie says, ""We are members of one another"".' -- Carl Elliott * The Hedgehog Review *"

Author Information

Robin Downie FRSE, FRSA is Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow and Professorial Research Fellow. His main philosophical writings include studies of his great predecessors in the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University — Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith — and in the philosophy and ethics of medicine. Along with Sir Kenneth Calman he began the movement known as 'medical humanities' and he has been a member of many national committees concerned with medical ethics. His many books on medical issues have been written with doctors as co-authors and he acknowledges what he has learned from these collaborations. But as we enter the post-pandemic period he saw the need to examine the practice of medicine from a more detached philosophical point of view. This book is the result.

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