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3rd Global Conference
Making Sense of: Health, Illness and Disease
Monday 5th July - Friday 9th July 2004
St Catherine's College, Oxford
Conference Programme, Abstract & Papers
Session 1: Wrestling with Disease, Illness and Culture
Chair: Bernie Warren
The Ontology of Disease
Jonathan Simon
Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science, University
of Leipzig, Germany
Ontological analysis is a prerequisite for any wholly general understanding of a phenomena. Before we gain an adequate understanding of how diseases are caused, why we may normatively evaluate them as we do (as malfunctions or improper functions of the human being), and what their effects on humans can be, we must first develop an understanding of what diseases are. To this end, we use the tools of classical and contemporary philosophical analysis to develop a new understanding of disease.
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Biomedicine and Culture: The Cultural Basis
of Modern Medicine and its Implications for Practice
Vera Kalitzkus
GeMeKo e.V.,
c/o Abt. Med. Psychologie,
Universität Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
Discussions about biomedicine are quite often concerned with moral and ethical implications of the new medical technologies that deeply affect the basic parameters of what it means to be human. These include for example reproductive technologies, organ transplantation or the use of stem cells and genetic engineering. I would like to use a different starting point: not focusing on the latest findings of this medical system, but instead looking at its main characteristics and its underlying assumptions. I will employ an ethnological approach to that endeavour: analysing biomedicine as a cultural system, which will show its cultural basis and determinants. Biomedicine is based on a western understanding of man and differs in that from other medical systems. Furthermore it is based on a specific view of health and illness that is deeply entrenched by social values and morals.
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Illness Aetiologies
James Davies
St Cross College, Oxford, United Kingdom
No abstract is presently available