Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T07:45:45.793Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The concepts of disease: a response

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2009

J. G. Scadding
J. G. Scadding*
Affiliation:
Emeritus Professor of Medicine, University of London; Honorary Consulting Physician, Brompton Hospital and Hammersmith Hospital, London
*
1Address for correspondence: Professor J. G. Scadding, 18 Seagrave Rd, Beaconsfield, Bucks, HP9 1SU.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

I am grateful for the opportunity to comment on Dr Kräupl Taylor's paper. I agree with much of what he says and think that he agrees with some of what I have said. We both disapprove of Platonic realism, for which the term ‘essentialism’ used by Popper (1945) seems to me preferable, since it avoids the danger of confusion with the very different meaning of ‘realism’ in the later idealism–realism opposition. But he has misunderstood my position in the nominalist-essentialist argument; and he seems to think that my statement about the meaning of the names of diseases in medical discourse and the application of ‘modern systems of class logic’ in medicine are in some way incompatible or discordant, whereas I think they are complementary to each other.

Type
Research Article
Information
Psychological Medicine , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , August 1980 , pp. 425 - 427
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Campbell, E. J. M., Scadding, J. G. & Roberts, R. S. (1979). The concept of disease. British Medical Journal ii, 757–762.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kendell, R. E. (1975). The Role of Diagnosis in Psychiatry. Blackwell: Oxford.Google Scholar
Popper, K. R. (1945). The Open Society and its Enemies Vol. 2, chapter 11. Routledge and Kegan Paul: London.Google Scholar
Scadding, J. G. (1959). Principles of definition in medicine. Lancet i, 323–325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scadding, J. G. (1967). Diagnosis: the clinician and the computer. Lancet ii, 877–882.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scadding, J. G. (1971). The definition of asthma. In The Identification of Asthma. Ciba Foundation Study Group no. 38. Churchill-Livingstone: Edinburgh.Google Scholar
Scadding, J. G. (1972). The semantics of medical diagnosis. International Journal of Bio-medical Computing 3, 83–90.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Scadding, J. G. (1975). The classification of disease. In Advances in Medical Computing (ed. Rose, J. and Mitchell, J. H.), pp. 5–9. Churchill-Livingstone: Edinburgh.Google Scholar
Scadding, J. G. (1976). Definition and clinical categorization. In Bronchial Asthma (ed. Segal, M. S. and Weiss, E. B.), pp. 19–30. Little, Brown: Boston.Google Scholar
Scadding, J. G. (1977). Definition and clinical categorization. In Asthma (ed. Clark, T. J. H. and Godfrey, S.), pp. 1–10. Chapman and Hall: London.Google Scholar