Existential Medicine explores the recent impact that the philosophies of existentialism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics have had on the health care professions. A growing body of scholarship drawing primarily on the work of Martin Heidegger and other influential twentieth-century figures such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Hans-Georg Gadamer has shaped contemporary research in the fields of bioethics, narrative medicine, gerontology, enhancement medicine, psychiatry and psychotherapy, and palliative care, among others. By regarding the human body as a decontextualized object, the prevailing paradigm of medical science often overlooks the bodyas it is lived. As a result, it fails to critically engage the experience of illness and the core questions of what it means and what it feels like to be ill. With work from emerging and renowned scholars in the field, this collection aims to shed light on these issues and the crucial need for clinicians to situate the experience of illness within the context of a patients life-world. To this end,Existential Medicine offers a valuable resource for philosophers and medical humanists as well as health care practitioners.

Kevin Aho is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Communication and Philosophy at Florida Gulf Coast University. He is the author of Existentialism: An Introduction (2014), Heideggers Neglect of the Body (2009), and co-author of Body Matters: A Phenomenology of Sickness, Illness, and Disease (2008).

Acknowledgments / Editors Introduction: Existential Medicine: Heidegger and the Lessons from Zollikon,Kevin Aho /Part I: New Currents in Existential Psychiatry / 1. The Cure for Existential Authenticity,Shaun Gallagher / 2. Emotional Disturbance, Trauma, and Authenticity: An Existential-Phenomenological Perspective,Robert Stolorow/ 3. Beyond the Ontological Difference: Heidegger, Binswanger, and the Future of Existential Analysis,Anthony Fernandez / 4. Between Anxiety and Nostalgia,Dylan Trigg /Part II: Phenomenologies of Anxiety, Pain, and Death / 5. The World of Chronic Pain: A Dialogue,Martin Kusch and Matthew Ratcliffe / 6. On theAutós of Autonomous Decision-Making: Intercorporeality, Temporality and Enacted Normativities in Transplantation Medicine,Kristin Zeiler 7. Reclaiming Embodiment in Medically Unexplained Physical Symptoms (MUPS),Jenny Slatman / 8. Heidegger, Curing Aging, and the Desirability of Immortality,Adam Buben /Part III: Ethics, Medicalization, and Technology / 9. Heideggers Philosophy of Technology and the Perils of Medicalization,Fredrik Svenaeus / 10. Breathlessness: From Bodily Symptom to Existential Experience,Tina Williams and Havi Carel / 11. Heideggerian Ethics and the Permissibility of Bio- and Nano-Medicine,Tara Kennedy /Part IV: Existential Health / 12. Losing the Measure of Health: Phenomenological Reflections on the Role ofTechne in Health Care Today,Carolyn Culbertson / 13. Existential Medicine and the Intersubjective Body,John Russon and Kirsten Jacobson / 14. Health Like a Broken Hammer or The Strange Wish to Make Health Disappear,Nicole Piemonte and Ramsey Eric Ramsey / 15. What is it to Age Well? Re-visioning Later Life,Drew Leder