The New Modern Medicine

Contemporary scientific medicine is a new modern medicine-one shaped by new disease epidemics, new norms of evidence, and the new sciences of epidemiology. Jonathan Fuller provides a philosophical treatment of this new modern medicine, an epidemiological medicine that has dominated healthcare for decades.
Epidemiological medicine is a model of medicine calibrated to the management of epidemic noncommunicable diseases such as cancers and chronic conditions, reliant on evidence from epidemiological studies such as clinical trials and infused with epidemiological thinking. The New Modern Medicine utilizes resources from the philosophy of science and the philosophy of medicine to examine disease and evidence in the new modern medicine, particularly problems brought about by the twentieth century integration of medicine with epidemiology.
Fuller explores topics such as the nature and evolution of modern scientific medicine, theories of contagion and cancer, the causation and classification of disease, the nature of chronic diseases and mental disorders, evidence-based medicine and therapeutic prediction, medical interventions and concepts of risk, problems of extrapolating from clinical trials, biased evidence and therapeutic skepticism, the foundations of personalized medicine, as well as the signs and symptoms of a looming postmodern medicine.

Jonathan Fuller is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh and Research Associate with the Centre for Philosophy of Epidemiology, Medicine, and Public Health at the University of Johannesburg.