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Wonder and the clinical encounter

Evans, HM

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Authors

HM Evans



Abstract

In terms of intervening in embodied experience, medical treatment is wonder-ful in its ambition and its metaphysical presumption; yet wonder’s role in clinical medicine has received little philosophical attention. In this paper I propose the value, to doctors and others in routine clinical life, of an openness to wonder and to the sense of wonder. Key to this is the identity of the central ethical challenges for most clinicians, being not the high-tech drama of popular conceptions of medical ethics but rather the routine of patients’ undramatic but unremitting demands for the clinician’s time and respectful attention. Wonder (conceived as an intense and transfiguring attentiveness) offers: an alternative and ubiquitous ethical source in place of the more familiar respect for rational autonomy; a source of renewal galvanising diagnostic imagination; and a timely recalling of the embodied agency of both patient and clinician.

Citation

Evans, H. (2012). Wonder and the clinical encounter. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 33(2), 123-136. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-012-9214-4

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Apr 1, 2012
Deposit Date Dec 16, 2011
Publicly Available Date Jul 17, 2012
Journal Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics
Print ISSN 1386-7415
Electronic ISSN 1573-1200
Publisher Springer
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 33
Issue 2
Pages 123-136
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-012-9214-4
Keywords Wonder, Sense of wonder, Clinical encounter, Philosophy, Ethics, Imagination.

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Copyright Statement
The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com





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