VITTORIO LINGIARDI and AGNESE GRIECO HERMENEUTICS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MEDICINE: HANS-GEORG GADAMER’S PLATONIC METAPHOR ABSTRACT. Taking as our starting point Plato’s metaphor of the doctor as philosopher we reflect on some aspects of the epistemological status of medicine. The framework to this paper is the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer which shows the paradoxical nature of Western medicine in choosing the body-object as its investigative starting point, while in actual fact dealing with subjects. Gadamer proposes a model of medicine as the art of understanding and dialogue, which is capable of bringing together its various constituent parts, i.e. knowledge, knowing how to do and knowing how to be, in medical practice and in the physician’s training. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the dyadic figure of the physician as Platonic “master of the living totality” and wounded healer, capable of activating the patient’s self-healing capacity. KEY WORDS: hermeneutics, medicine, the doctor–patient relationship But the other doctor, who is a freeman, . . . carries his inquiries far back, and goes into the nature of the disorder; he enters into discourse with the patient and with his friends, and is at once getting information from the sick man, and also instructing him as far as he is able .... 1 INTRODUCTION Thus writes Plato in the Laws, comparing the doctor to the philosopher and the patient to the pupil, or rather, to the interlocutor of Plato’s Dialogues. A true doctor, just as a true philosopher, is not he who possesses know- ledge and dispenses it from on high, but he who initiates in the other that process which leads to healing, i.e. he who, in Plato’s words, “transforms the patient into physician.” By re-enacting the role of Socrates, the Platonic doctor does not confine himself to apply what he knows, or believes he knows, but through the treatment he confronts the patient and enters into touch with him. 2 What meaning does Plato’s metaphor have in the philosophy of medicine? 3 More specifically, what does the possible acceptance of the Platonic model, a part from the “good sense” that every astute clinician can appreciate, entail within the present epistemological status of medical Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 20: 413–422, 1999. © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.