New York University Press has published a book edited by Ana Marta González and Joseph E. Davis, members of the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra. It is titled ‘To Fix To Heal. Patient Care, Public Health, and the Limits of Biomedicine'.

The collected essays in this book do more than document the persistence of reductionist approaches and the attendant extension of medicalization to more and more aspects of our lives. The contributors also shed valuable light on why reductionism has persisted and why more holistic models, incorporating social and environmental factors, have gained so little traction.

Renewal of the ethical and political discourse

The contributors examine the moral appeal of reductionism, the larger rationalist dream of technological mastery, the growing valuation of health, and the enshrining of individual responsibility as the seemingly non-coercive means of intervention and control.

Precisely because of the centrality of the biomedical approach to our society, the contributors argue, challenging the reductionist model and its ever-widening effects is perhaps the best way to press for a much-needed renewal of the ethical and political discourse. 

Ana Marta González is Associate Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Navarra, Spain, where she is the Director of the Emotional Culture and Identity project of the ICS. She is also the Academic Director of the Social Trends Institute.

Joseph E. Davis is Research Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Research at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He is the Publisher of The Hedgehog Review. He is also a collaborator within the ‘Emotional Culture and Identity' project of the ICS.