Understanding Symptoms: Diagnosis, Cure, and Bodily Reintegration
A collaboration between the Ox-Cam-Lon Philosophy of Medicine Society and the Medical Humanities Research Hub
Friday 8 May 2026, 3pm - 5pm
Seminar Room 63, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities
Speaker: Helene Scott-Fordmand, Lecturer in Medicine, Health and Society, Dept of Science & Technology Studies, University College London
All Welcome
What is lost if we don’t have a diagnosis? This article examines the aims of clinical medicine and the role of understanding in these aims. Starting from a case prompt with a patient suffering from persistent physical symptoms, I argue that understanding is at the clinical core and that the target of such understanding is the patient’s body with symptoms.
Synthesizing accounts of medical understanding and phenomenology of illness, I suggest that the understanding sought in the clinic extends beyond mechanistic explanation to include a sense of bodily intelligibility and that diagnoses are useful but not necessary tools to this end.
Medical Humanities Research Hub, TORCH Research Hubs
