Bridging Clinical Distance: An Empathic Rediscovery of the Known

In this essay, I argue that traditional medical views of illness systematically exclude intuitive knowledge from their description of disease and thus result in a functionally impressive but humanly ungrounded medicine. Physicians trained in a technologized anatomico-pathologic view of disease find themselves cut off from much of what they knew about illness when they began their training. Not only do they lack a rigorous or formal way to confront the non-technical aspects of medical practice, but many have even lost sight of the motives for medicine. I argue here for an intuitively based humanly grounded ontology of illness. Such an ontology begins in an understanding of the experience of the sick person rather than in a "objective" description of pathology. It is only through a science of illness-as-lived that one may achieve a truly humanistic medicine.