This volume explores a wide range of topics and figures in both medicine and philosophy, and brings them together in a manner that demonstrates how these two significant fields are mutually enlightening. Medicine, the author suggests, reveals deep but rarely explicit themes whose proper comprehension invites a careful phenomenological and hermeneutical explication. Certain philosophical approaches, on the other hand - specifically, Heidegger's phenomenology and Gadamer's hermeneutics - are shown to have a hitherto unrealized potential for making sense of those themes long buried within Western medicine.