The 'medical body' as philosophy's arena

Medicine, as Byron Good argues, reconstitutes the human body of our daily e xperience as a "medical body,'' unfamiliar outside medicine. This reconstit ution can be seen in two ways: (i) as a salutary reminder of the extent to which the reality even of the human body is constructed; and (ii) as an are na for what Stephen Toulmin distinguishes as the ``intersection'' of natura l science and history, in which many of philosophy's traditional (and tradi tionally abstract) questions are given concrete and urgent form. This paper begins by examining a number of dualities between the medical body and the body familiar in daily experience. Toulmin's epistemological analysis of c linical medicine as combining both universal and existential knowledge is t hen considered. Their expression, in terms of attention, respectively, to n atural science and to personal history, is explored through the epistemolog ical contrasts between the medical body and the familiar body, noting the t raditional philosophical questions which they in turn illustrate.