Abstract

Drew Leder's Clinical Interpretation: The Hermeneutics of Medicine [1] is an essay which understates its case and thereby opens itself to misinterpretation. This response to Leder argues for a more thorough-going hermeneutic for both medicine and science. At the conceptual as well as the practical level, modern medicine and its scientific foundations are hermeneutic enterprises. The purpose of this essay is to argue that we should not back away from this more radical thesis. Embracing it will result in less alienation of physicians from patients, and of physicians from the tasks of medicine.