Epidemiological Medicine

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In The New Modern Medicine, Fuller tells a story about scientific change in medicine in which laboratory science made medicine modern by the first half of the 1900s but epidemiology remade modern medicine in the second half of the century, leading to a ‘new modern’ epidemiological medicine that we inhabit today. This new style of scientific medicine models itself after epidemiology by importing epidemiological concepts and theories into the clinic, including concepts and theories of disease causation (multifactorial etiology), evidence (à la evidence-based medicine), and prognosis and prevention (understood as risk and risk reduction). Epidemiological medicine created new puzzles for clinical medicine, including the problem of extrapolating population-level results from clinical research and using them to guide individual patient care. Those problems can only be solved through philosophical analysis of the underlying epidemiological concepts and theories. In this talk, Fuller sketches some of the results of the book’s analysis.

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