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Podcast: Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast
Episode: Vanessa Rampton, "Making Medical Progress: History of a Contested Idea" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Description: Answers to the question 'what is medical progress?' have always been contested, and any one response is always bound up with contextual ideas of personhood, society, and health. However, the widely held enthusiasm for medical progress escapes more general critiques of progress as a conceptual category.
From the intersection of intellectual history, philosophy, and the medical humanities, in Making Medical Progress: History of a Contested Idea (Cambridge UP, 2025) Dr. Vanessa Rampton sheds light on the politics of medical progress and how they have downplayed the tensions between individual and social goods. She examines how a shared co...