A science of individuals: medicine and casuistry.
Clinical medicine is the application of scientific principles, rules of thumb, and a store of practical wisdom embodied in narratives of individual cases to the care of a person who is ill. Physicians are taught to observe and report the individual case both as a means of fitting nomothetic generalizations to the given circumstances and as a way of refining those generalizations. This narrative construction of illness is a principal way of knowing in medicine. In this view, disease is not so much an entity as an identifiable chronological organization of the events of illness, and medicine, rather than a science, a rational science-using activity in the service of the ill.
Ethics and Human Values Program, Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago, IL 60611.
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Hunter
D002983:Clinical Competence; D003658:Decision Making, Computer-Assisted; D007206:Individuality; D010686:Philosophy, Medical; D010820:Physicians / Q000523:psychology*