This is the second edition of Springer's first wide-ranging, multi-authored handbook on philosophy of medicine. It covers the underlying conceptual issues of many important social, political and ethical issues in health care and, as such, provides a single source of information for this far-ranging and still developing field. This new edition of this authoritative handbook includes topics that have gained momentum in the last couple of years. This second edition introduces and develops nearly one hundred topics, concepts, and issues in the field. It is written by distinguished specialists from multiple disciplines, including philosophy, health sciences, nursing, sociology, political theory, and medicine.

Many complicated social and ethical issues in health care are based on conceptual problems, most prominently on the definitions of health and disease, or on epistemological issues regarding causality or diagnosis. Philosophy is the discipline that deals with such conceptual, metaphysical, epistemological, methodological, and axiological matters. This handbook covers all the central concepts in medicine, such as ageing, death, disease, mental disorder, and well-being. It is an invaluable resource for health care specialists who want to be informed and stay up to date with the relevant discussions, as well as philosophers and ethicists with an interest in medicine, and members of the general public with an interest in health care and related issues. The text also advances these debates and sets the agenda for years to come.

The first comprehensive- handbook in the field of philosophy of medicine This 2nd edition includes important emerging topics in the field such as AI in medicine Covers philosophical foundations of many important health-related social, political and ethical issues

Autorentext

Thomas Schramme is Professor of Philosophy at the Liverpool. He works mainly on theories of health and disease and on philosophical topics in psychiatry. He has also published on health justice.

Mary Jean Walker is Lecturer in philosophy at La Trobe University. Her work in the philosophy of medicine includes contributions to debate on the concept of disease and investigation of the epistemology of personalised medicine. She also has research interests in bioethics, especially emerging technology bioethics and applications of medical phenomenology .

Inhalt
Core concepts in health care.- Organisms.- Patients.- Clinical settings.- Medical knowledge.- Nosology.- Health care systems/ institutions.- Medicine in the service of law/politics.- Metaphilosophy of medicine and health care.