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of biology and physiology, or they have been viewed as psychosomatic symptoms, by agood number of the phenomenologically inspired psychiatrists. 39There are some exceptions to this selective focus on psychiatry in the history of thephenomenology of medicine, phenomenological attempts in which the body is given amore explicit and independent place. No references, however, are given by Gadamer inThe Enigma of Health to thinkers such as F. J. J. Buytendijk and Erwin Straus, and thisis perhaps not surprising given the informal character of the work -- many of the paperswere originally written for oral presentations. Nevertheless, I feel that Gadamer’s manyingenious hints and examples in The Enigma of Health need to be incorporated in a systematicanalysis of the living body (Leiblichkeit) and its being-in-the-world in health andsickness. 40 In this future project, links could be established with the phenomenology ofMerleau-Ponty (Buytendijk’s major source of inspiration) and/or to the Daseinsanalysenof Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss. 41The thesis that medical practice is a hermeneutic activity in the Gadamerian sense ofa dialogical encounter between reader (doctor) and text (patient) on the way to truth (aboutthe person and his lacking health), tends to expose itself to exactly the same kind ofcritical questions that were put to Gadamer by Jürgen Habermas and others, following thepublication of Wahrheit und Methode in the sixties. 42 One must take into account the embeddednessof clinical activity in the political context, which has a major influence on thestructure of medicine. That analysis would have to be carried out by studying the interconnectionbetween the more specific meaning patterns of clinical activity and the sociopoliticalpattern of, for example, the organisation of health care and medical science.Interestingly, as we have seen above, Gadamer nurtures such a critical perspective by hisroots in a Heideggerian phenomenology, which can be (and has been) developed as acritique of modern technology. Discussing the emergence of new psychopharmacologicaldrugs, in a paper dated 1986, Gadamer writes:I am thinking, for example, of the world of modern psychiatric drugs. But I cannotseparate this development from the general instrumentalization of the living bodywhich also occurs in the world of modern agriculture, in the economy and in industrial39That the university of Heidelberg, the place where Gadamer spent the second half of his long life,has hosted some of the most prominent figures in this tradition of phenomenological psychiatry, such asViktor von Weizsäcker and Wolfgang Blankenburg, is no doubt one of the reasons why Gadamer beganapproaching the themes of medicine and health in the sixties. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, PhilosophischeLehrjahre: Eine Rückschau (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977). Weizsäcker, Blankenburg (andJaspers) are mentioned by Gadamer in Über die Verborgenheit der Gesundheit, but without doubt he alsoknew the works of Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss and other key figures of this German tradition. SeeHerbert Spiegelberg, Phenomenology in Psychology and Psychiatry: A Historical Introduction (Evanston,Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1972).40Recently, American phenomenologists, prominently Drew Leder, Kay Toombs and Richard Zaner,have done important work in the phenomenology of medicine with an emphasis on the living body. Fora survey see Kay Toombs, ed., Handbook of Phenomenology and Medicine (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001).41Another possible source of inspiration for future phenomenologies of health and sickness are theseminars conducted during the sixties by Heidegger, together with Boss and his students, which now havebeen published: Zollikoner Seminare (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1994). These seminars appear to beone of the very few places where Heidegger addresses not only health and sickness, but also embodiment(Leiblichkeit). Heidegger, otherwise reluctant to discuss the specific activities of everydayness, is hereforced to address these themes in the presentation of his philosophy. The encounter between the famousphilosopher and the doctors offers very stimulating reading, since Heidegger (even more than in his lecturecourses) has to mobilize all his pedagogical skills in the face of questions asked by a philosophicallyuntrained audience.42Karl-Otto Apel, ed., Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971).184