Caring and Curing : A Philosophy of Medicine and Social Work

First published in 1980, Caring and Curing is for all those involved in the ‘caring professions’ – medicine, social work, and the other health and welfare occupations. It is both an introduction to philosophy for the caring professions and a philosophy of those professions. The authors believe that the best way to introduce philosophy is to engage in it, to philosophize, and that the most exciting way to philosophize is to offer a reasoned but controversial point of view on matters to which people are professionally committed.

They argue, first, that there is an essential unity of the caring professions in that the concepts of health and welfare are different aspects of a single value judgement as to what sort of life a person should be enabled to live in his society. Secondly, they show the limits of scientific expertise in relation to human behaviour and argue that the education of medical and social workers should include broader humane disciplines to assist them in coping with the problems of ethics and values of all kinds in present-day society. Thus, the discussion introduces the main branches of philosophy and deals with many of the current moral dilemmas in medicine and social work.