PAMLA 2025: Care and Cure: Critical Approaches to Medical Humanities in the Modern World
In all medical practices, two goals stand out: to cure and to care. In a vernacular context, care is discursive, relational, and mutual, while cure is linear, utilitarian, and quantifiable. In his book Care and Cure: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Medicine, Jacob Stegenga iterates on two sides of the care-cure conundrum: “[...] when an intervention mitigates harm then it provides some care, and when an intervention mitigates abnormal biological functioning
then it goes some way toward cure.”