(Re-)pedagogising medicine: Health through seeing, healing, and hoping with a pedagogical gaze

Different approaches to health have gained more prominence over the last few years within medicine. While these have improved life during and after illness, they often remain limited in scope, privileging ‘objective’, biomedicalised accounts, while neglecting the subjective human experience. Drawing on Georges Canguilhem’s philosophy of medicine and normativity, this article proposes that the process of healing within medicine – as the subjective art of healing within the craft of ‘curing’ – should be understood not solely as a biomedical phenomenon, but as a pedagogical process in which patients and medical practitioners engage together in noticing, interpreting, and responding to changes brought about by illness. By attending to the pedagogical dimension of health, medical practitioners and patients can approach health not only as an ‘objective’ state of our bodies, but also as a way through which we relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world we inhabit. In adopting this pedagogical gaze on illness, we can employ medicine in a pedagogical way that helps us to live well with our experiences of being sick. By seeing disease not simply as an individual interruption or failure, but as a condition that shapes the possibilities of living, we create a pedagogical hopeful gaze that makes living a good life possible, even within its biomedical limits and degradation. Ultimately, this article challenges conventional approaches to health and reimagines medicine’s role in it as a co-normative and pedagogical interlocutor that shares in the human pursuit of living a good life with others.