ABSTRACT
The popular image of medicine is that it has made great strides in its ability to diagnose and treat disease, and thereby restore health and quality of life to those struck down with ill-health. Whilst public health medicine does articulate a view of health and disease very different from that found in clinical medicine, the critique of medicine it furnishes is more sympathetic to medicine than the outsider critiques. The chapter outlines a sociological critique of clinical medicine, an economic and, finally, a managerial critique. It describes a public health medicine viewpoint that acknowledges the value of some of these social science views but adds to them other views and emphases, constructing a synthesis from the available critiques. There are many critiques that display either explicit or implicit evaluations of medicine, ‘critique’ being best understood as an academic word for ‘criticism’.
