New Books In Medicine

Can we define ‘clinical reasoning’? Is it the ability to marshal the best available evidence to come to adecision within a medical framework, or is it the capacity to think holistically aboutwhether a given intervention is in the patient’s best interest? In his book, Intuition in Medicine: A Philosophical Defense of Clinical Reasoning (University of Chicago Press, 2012), Hillel Braude considers this apparent gap in the history of medical thought. He argues throughout that intuition provides the missing link between medical and moral reasoning. Rather than setting forth a definition of intuition outright, Braude traces its articulations through canonical works of philosophy and medical ethics. One comes away with an understanding that intuition is something like a pre-reflective practical wisdom bound to human faculties, resisting abstraction. Even this definition is contextually malleable, and through his historical and philosophical exploration he draws out the epistemological (and often pr