Handbook of the Philosophy of Medicine

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.