[Andrzej_Wiercinski_(ed ... - WordPress.com

In the realm of medicine, in any case, the dialogue between doctor and patient cannotsimply be regarded as a preparation for or introduction to the treatment proper. Thedialogue between doctor and patient must rather be seen as part of the treatment itselfand as something which remains important throughout the entire process of making arecovery. 8In both cases -- the critique of modern medicine as domination, and the attempt atdeveloping the hermeneutic essence present in a clinical meeting, when approaching aphenomenology of health and sickness -- Gadamer reverts to his Heideggerian phenomenologicalroots. In this paper I will try to show how the hermeneutic philosophy developedby Gadamer in his first main work, Truth and Method, is indeed a phenomenological hermeneutics,and how one needs to acknowledge this phenomenological heritage in orderto understand the directions taken in The Enigma of Health. 9 This reading will enable usto see more clearly, what kind of contribution (and challenge) Gadamer offers to contemporarymedical philosophy and ethics.This strategy will also enable us to return to the fundamental question we started outwith above, only better equipped: In what sense could medical practice be considered inany way a hermeneutic activity? Given that doctors and other health care personnel are,in some everyday sense, “interpreting” their “material,” is this not a kind of interpretative pattern,which is fundamentally different from the outline of understanding found in Gadamer’shermeneutics? Or is it rather the other way round? Will medical practice prove to behermeneutic in a more profound sense than the reading of any historical text? HaveGadamer’s attempts to approach medicine within the framework of his own philosophypaved the way for a Gadamerian hermeneutics of medicine, which could not only walkin his footsteps, but also try to develop the hints we find in The Enigma of Health in amore consistent way?Hermeneutics and PhenomenologyRichard Palmer has traced for us the roots of the word “hermeneutics,” in his book withthe same title:The Greek word hermeios referred to the priest at the Delphic oracle. This word andthe more common verb hermeneuein and noun hermeneia point back to the wing-footedmessenger-god Hermes, from whose name the words are apparently derived (or viceversa?). Significantly, Hermes is associated with the function of transmuting what isbeyond human understanding into a form that human intelligence can grasp. The variousforms of the word suggest the process of bringing a thing or situation from unintelligibilityto understanding. The Greeks credited Hermes with the discovery of languageclassique (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1961) and Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regardmédical (Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 1963), is here developed in the direction of a phenomenology of everydaylife. As we will see in what follows, Gadamer too returns to Greek philosophy in sketching out a phenomenologyof medicine. Foucault’s philosophy of medicine and illness is actually mentioned by Gadamer,once, in The Enigma of Health, 169.8Ibid., 128. “Auf alle Fälle ist im Bereich der Medizin das Gespräch keine bloße Einleitung undVorbereitung der Behandlung. Es ist bereits Behandlung und geht in die weitere Behandlung ein, die zurHeilung führen soll.” Gadamer, Über die Verborgenheit der Gesundheit, 162.9The papers of the latter work range in time from the early sixties to the early nineties, whichmeans that the development of a phenomenological hermeneutics of medicine evolves, in Gadamer’sphilosophy, over a period of at least thirty years.171