The concepts of medicine and health are becoming conflated. This can be seen in the language of medicine and health: medicine is discussed in terms of health and health in terms of medicine. A review of literature by medicine and health scholars gives evidence of the conflation and of its effects. The collapse of two concepts into one constrains the development and utilization of medicine and the meaning and pursuit of health. The conflation also obscures the distinction and separate relevance of disease and illness to both medicine and health. The claim is that medicine and health are distinct concepts and that a recognition of them as separate is beneficial. Medicine is a means for humans. Health is an end of humans and is the prototypical condition of "how life ought to be." An understanding of medicine and health as separate concepts is beneficial to the development and utilization of medicine and to the meaning and pursuit of health. Furthermore, the separation of medicine and health clarifies the importance of medicine to disease and the significance of illness to health. / Graduation date: 2003

The research described in this thesis addresses two central issues. The first issue concerns the development of a series of practice standards that will promote the quality of the lives of older people who live in nursing homes. However, before this professional issue is addressed, it is necessary to explore the meaning of the underlying concept the quality of life, and this constitutes the second issue.The purpose of this research is therefore to develop a concept of the quality of life that can adequately support a series of practice standards. The thesis is presented in five parts. Part one outlines the theoretical context of the study. It contains two chapters. The first discusses philosophical hermeneutics, which forms the conceptual and methodological framework of the research; and the second reviews aspects of the literature of the quality of life and evaluates it in terms of the purposes of the research. Part two of the thesis describes the empirical phase of the research, including the approach to data collection and the analytical strategy that was used. In part three the findings are presented, and in part four their implications are discussed for the organisation of care, and practice standards are derived. Part five evaluates the research, paying particular attention to the usefulness of philosophical hermeneutics, and suggestions are made for further research.

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Allergies have taken on cultural meanings other than those offered by biomedicine. Interviews with allergic and non-allergic Americans were used to investigate the explanatory models of the lay population. This thesis uses ethnographic data to examine explanatory models of allergic conditions, highlighting metaphorical uses of allergies in American culture. The explanatory models of the subjects were contrasted to the biomedical model and the stereotypes created by the media in the United States. Important topics addressed in the analysis of the interview material were: what are the explanatory models of allergies in America, how do allergies influence the selfimage of someone with that condition, and how Americans with and without allergies perceive the allergic individual. / by Micheline M. Hilpert. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

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This thesis is about the body and about how medical discourses conceptualise the body in health and in illness. However, any inquisitiveness about the body is determined by historical, social and political environment that nurtures the discursive formations of knowledge. I focus particularly on the conceptualisation of the body in the two distinct medical traditions of Western and Chinese medicine. I examine Michel Foucault's analysis on the medical gaze and on the external technologies of power deployed on the body of the individual and on the social body. The knowledge generated from the medical gaze is articulated through a normalising and prescriptive discourse. The gaze of Chinese medicine that looks at the workings of the cosmos to define the truth about the body generates similar authoritative knowledge that targets the individual and the social body. However, this effect of power, although it never disappears entirely, undergoes significant transformations when it enters the arena of human activities and the potential for improvisation in the behaviour of the human actor. There is always a gap between the text and the practice.

In “Bodies of Wisdom,” I reassert the primacy of the body in the philosophical practices of two early modern French authors, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) and Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), whose writings have been associated with the ancient tradition of “philosophy as a way of life.” Harkening back to the Classical understanding of philosophy as a form of medicine, these authors’ works rely a good deal on somatic and/or medical terminology to describe states of the soul and philosophical practices more generally. While there exists a wide body of literature that addresses the medical analogy in Hellenistic philosophers, few commentators have ventured to read the analogy literally, and none thus far have done so for authors of the early modern period. In this dissertation, I reclaim the literal relationship between medicine and philosophy by examining instances in both authors where descriptions of health and illness can be read both metaphorically (“spiritually”) and literally (“somatically”). Philosophy is not just like medicine in that it seeks to bring about individual well-being; it is medicine in the fullest sense, because the exercises intended to bring about well-being must pass through the body in order to give lasting shape to the life of the practitioner. Many scholars have acknowledged Pascal’s inheritance of Montaigne’s moderate skepticism, and as one of history’s most astute – and sometimes acerbic – readers of Montaigne, Pascal was uniquely poised to highlight those aspects of Montaigne’s philosophy that attenuated the reader’s belief in the power of human reason. This meant that for both authors, there had to be some more reliable alternative to the reasoning mind to arrive at an understanding of truth. The body, it turns out, served just such a purpose. Although Montaigne and Pascal had very different purposes in writing the Essais and the Pensées, respectively, I show how a mutual concern for empirical certainty amidst the tenuousness of philosophical and religious opinion precipitated a return to bodily experience, as the most viable means of knowing the self and the world. Despite the widespread conception of the early modern period as one of “thoroughgoing” – and one might say, Cartesian – dualism between body and mind, I argue that Montaigne and Pascal are evidence of a countertrend: their writings suggest that we cannot think our way to philosophical virtue; we must enact that virtue through our bodies, using them as tools for interpretation and modification of our internal states. I thereby call into question a distinction that is commonly made between somatic techniques, on the one hand, and spiritual exercises, on the other, in much of the literature on philosophy as a way of life. The implications of this are far-reaching: if the suffering that philosophy purports to treat is at once spiritual and somatic, then the “spiritual” exercises designed to address this suffering also borrow a great deal from the soma, and should be advertised as such. Further, if spiritual health is indeed contingent on our relationship to the soma, then the classic definition of philosophy as a “spiritual” practice (namely, one associated with the logos) needs to be expanded to include the material and/or somatic dimensions of the discipline. Although I try to provide a clear roadmap for how these authors go about spiritual healing, I recognize that the trajectory to spiritual health is seldom very direct. Surely, we can find examples of somatic exercises that appear to have a predictable effect on the mind and, inversely, spiritual exercises that yield positive physical results. However, the process of effecting change and training for virtue is almost never unidirectional. The constant trafficking between body and mind, evidenced most abundantly by the passions, belies a much less tidy relationship between the two faculties. To describe this relationship, I rely both on early modern medical therapeutics and on Pierre Bourdieu’s twentieth-century conception of habitus. Viewed through the lens of habitus, the practice of philosophy can be conceived as a process of embodiment, wherein the practitioner appropriates and accommodates in a bodily way the virtues traditionally aligned with the good life—before realizing that, as habitus, he or she is always, already well-adapted to the good and thus endowed with a certain form of health from the beginning.

Submitted by Filipe dos Santos (fsantos@pucsp.br) on 2018-09-26T10:04:41Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Rosele Maria Branco.pdf: 1809219 bytes, checksum: c3df6d4239e08ec9cc217813972cef82 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-09-26T10:04:41Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Rosele Maria Branco.pdf: 1809219 bytes, checksum: c3df6d4239e08ec9cc217813972cef82 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-08-27 / This work starts from the death experiences and the encounter with Michel Foucault thoughts, to interrogate the medical discursive practices about the pretension of the construction of a totalizing and hegemonic knowledge about the individuals. This thesis followed two parallel projects: one seeking to understand the descriptions of the book Naissance de la Clinique about modern medicine, denominated by Foucault as clinical medicine; and the other, concerned to contribute with medical formation. It was decided to organize the work following Foucault demarcations about the medical knowledge that are, mainly, in the book L’archéologie du savoir, because they made sense to explain the generalized dispersion of the medical knowledge in our days. References to Foucault biopolitics studies were included, whereas this moment indicates another important theme from the reflection about medicine. It was concluded that the power of the medical knowledge is in the way that it perceives, penetrates and approaches the body, even though its truths might be partial and provisory. Two dialogue directions are proposed to a new medical art, more flexible, critical and fair: one in the discussion of the new layers that can be added to the medical knowledge, and another, in the analysis of the experiences of medical practices / Partiu-se das vivências da morte e do encontro com o pensamento de Michel Foucault, para interrogar as práticas discursivas médicas sobre a pretensão da construção de um saber totalizante e hegemônico sobre os indivíduos. A tese seguiu dois trajetos paralelos: um buscando compreender as descrições do livro Naissance de la clinique sobre a medicina moderna, denominada por Foucault de medicina clínica; e o outro, preocupado em contribuir com a formação dos médicos. Apostou- se em organizar o trabalho seguindo as demarcações de Foucault acerca do saber médico que constam, principalmente, no livro L’archéologie du savoir, porque faziam sentido para explicar a dispersão generalizada do saber médico na atualidade. Incluíram-se referências aos estudos biopolíticos de Foucault, visto que esse momento indica outro tema importante da reflexão acerca da medicina. Concluiu-se que a força do saber médico está na forma como ele percebe, penetra e apreende o corpo, a despeito de que suas verdades sejam parciais e provisórias. Propõem-se duas direções de diálogo para uma nova arte médica mais flexível, crítica e justa: uma na discussão de novas camadas que possam ser acrescentadas ao saber médico; outra, na análise das vivências da prática médica

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-27T17:27:22Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Washington Luis Souza.pdf: 689943 bytes, checksum: ab580f6061104e014a2c9751801dd26b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008-04-07 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / This study aims to present, having Michael Foucault s work as basis, to present the transition from classic medicine (centuries XVII and XVIII) to modern medicine (centuries XIX and XX), as a turning point, opposed to the teleologic evolution thesis proposed by the traditional medical historiography. On institutional basis, we will approach the dichotomy between medical practices and the classic hospital institutions, placing the creation of therapeutic hospital as a fact of modern age. This dissertation tries to show that classic medicine which classifies pathological species was a knowledge based in natural history and reached its top at the end of Classic Age, when the knowledge from biology, such as anatomy and physiology, were applied to the study of pathologies creating the modern empirical medicine. Modern medicine was constituted as a different knowledge with subject, object, concepts and methods completely distinct. However this change hasn´t happened due to the improvement of knowledge and practice, but because of studies that were developed outside the medical field, apart from the medical reason. Therefore it is not justificable to think about the history of medicine in terms of evolutionary continuity, being best described, on the contrary, as a discontinuous and not progressive history / Este estudo tem por objetivo, a partir da leitura da obra de Michel Foucault, apresentar a transição da medicina clássica (séculos XVII e XVIII) à medicina moderna (séculos XIX e XX), como momento de ruptura, em oposição à tese da evolução teleológica proposta pela historiografia médica tradicional. No plano institucional, serão abordadas as dicotomias entre as práticas médicas e as instituições hospitalares clássicas, situando o nascimento do hospital médico terapêutico como um fato próprio da modernidade. Esta dissertação procura explicitar que a medicina clássica classificatória das espécies patológicas, era um saber fundamentado na história natural e chegou ao seu limite no final da Idade Clássica, quando saberes originários da biologia, a exemplo da anatomia e da fisiologia, foram aplicados ao estudo das patologias criando a medicina empírica moderna. A medicina moderna se constituiu como um saber de outra ordem, com sujeito, objeto, conceitos e métodos absolutamente distintos. Contudo, essa mutação não se deu em virtude do aperfeiçoamento dos conhecimentos e das práticas, mas por meio de estudos desenvolvidos fora do campo médico, alheios à intencionalidade da razão médica. Não se justificaria, portanto, pensar a história da medicina em termos de continuidade evolutiva, cabendo descrevê-la, ao contrário, como uma história descontínua e não progressiva

Philos.-Theol. Hochsch., Diss--Vallendar, 2007.