THE PHILOSOPHY OF HEALTH
Series editor
Gergely Tari, University of Szeged
Book series description
Medical practice has always been a normative profession. Moral values and ethical considerations imperceptibly undermine both doctors’ and patients’ behavior: seeking and providing medical care inevitably represents how we conceptualize the states of health and disease. The demarcation of ‘normal’ from ‘abnormal’ mental and physical conditions has numerous normative implications. The critical reading of the process of medicalization according to which a given culture describes and treats some conditions as medical problems has been a highly influential topic in social sciences, since Peter Conrad captured the phenomenon in the 1970s.
The degree of technological development of modern societies often exceeds the speed of social and moral maturity. In these past decades of rapidly evolving biomedical technology, reflecting on the philosophical, bioethical and medical anthropological aspects of health and disease and the evolution of the relationship among health care providers and patients would be crucially important. With this book series, we aim to continue the exploration of this multidisciplinary field. We welcome studies dedicated to the following topics (but not only): the medicalization of human reproduction (pregnancy, childbirth, etc.); the medicalization of psychiatry; the medicalization of end-of-life care, philosophical analyses of health and disease; philosophical and anthropological reflections on the concept of beauty ideals; etc.
Upcoming books
The Medicalization of Childbirth