Introduction

This introduction places the work, situating it between medical sociology and the history and philosophy of medicine, and provides a brief overview of the main ideas to be discussed later on. It is suggested that the concepts which philosophers associate with disease lose clarity upon closer inspection, but that this is not necessarily a reason to abandon them. On the contrary, they leave us with a broad and useful framework for understanding illness and the mediated experiences of patients. At the end of this chapter, the book is framed as a piece of work specifically and self-consciously grounded in a time and place, because any philosophy that aspires to timelessness inevitably tends towards stagnation.