Abstract
What might ‘the virtues of medicine’ mean? If we start to answer this by asking next what does ‘virtue’ mean and if we try to answer this by reference to ordinary occurrences of the word, we find that it occurs almost exclusively in the context of the idiom ‘by virtue of … ’. This expresses causal or contextual explanation as in ‘By virtue of his great weight, he was able to break down the door’ or ‘By virtue of much world travel, she was able to pass the geography test.’ In this sense, a discussion of ‘the virtues of medicine’ might call for a discussion of what medicine can produce.
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Erde, E.L. (1985). The Virtues of Medicine: Meaning and Import. In: Shelp, E.E. (eds) Virtue and Medicine. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5229-4_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5229-4_10
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