Bridging Clinical Distance: An Empathic Rediscovery of the Known

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Abstract
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 an “objective” description of pathology. It is only through a science of illness-as-lived that one may achieve a truly humanistic medicine.

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