Scott-Fordsmand, Helene;
(2025)
Understanding Symptoms: diagnosis, cure, and bodily re-integration.
Philosophy of Science
10.1017/psa.2025.10175.
(In press).
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Abstract
What is lost, if we don’t have a diagnosis? This article examines the aims of clinical medicine, and the role of understanding in this. Starting from a case prompt with a patient suffering from persistent physical symptoms, I argue that understanding is at the clinical core, and that the target of such understanding is the patient body with symptoms. Synthesising accounts of medical understanding and phenomenology of illness, I suggest that the understanding sought in the clinic extends beyond mechanistic explanation to include a sense of bodily intelligibility, and that diagnoses are useful but not necessary tools to this end.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Understanding Symptoms: diagnosis, cure, and bodily re-integration |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1017/psa.2025.10175 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1017/psa.2025.10175 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Science and Technology Studies |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10215183 |
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