Cooper's Theory Of Disease

Introduction

Christopher Boorse defines the pathology of a disease as being “its morbid anatomy, i.e. the structural changes in body tissues that underlie its signs and symptoms ”. In what follows I wish to defend the point of view that this naturalist conception encompasses completely the character of a disease. Hence what it is for something to be a disease is not dictated at all by normative sociological concepts as disease is purely biological. With respect to the idea of disease having a social component I will particularly be focusing on Cooper’s account, showing how, when properly considered it does not fit with our conception of disease, which leaves the only viable option being that our concept of disease is purely biological. After

We consider the afflicted person to be unlucky

3. Can be potentially medically treated

The social component of Cooper’s conception can be most starkly seen in Cooper’s second point, she expands later to confirm that she does not mean unlucky in a statistical manner but instead what we, society would consider unlucky . Normativity is also very much present in the first of her conditions; she defines what is good for someone as being what “that individual would judge it to be good in ideal circumstances, for example, if they had all the information, and were calmer and wiser” .

Cooper’s conditions are not sufficient for something satisfying them to be considered a disease. Consider the child of two parents with perfect noses who has a particularly ugly nose, this nose does not affect their respiratory system in any way it just isn’t at all aesthetically pleasing. It could easily argued that an ugly nose is a bad thing to have when all things are considered, coming from a family of particularly visually pleasing noses and being born with an ugly nose could, with Cooper’s vague definition of unluckiness, it could be considered unlucky and the nose could be “medically treated” using a rhinoplasty operation. However it does not seem to be the case that we want to define someone with an ugly nose, or any other physical feature, as diseased if it does not affect their

However I will now argue that reference classes are not necessary to ensure certain things which we would not considered diseases are not considered so. The solution is simply to use greater clarity when we are describing a certain condition. Without appealing to the reference class of sex we can see that asking the question of whether a biological male has abnormal menstruation is like asking whether the colour green is greater than the number three; it just doesn’t make sense; our definition of abnormal menstruation references anatomy which biological males don’t possess. It seems very plausible that any disease which only affects a certain proportion of humanity can be explained and clarified so that it does not make sense to try and attribute the disease to a member of the population without certain features. Thereby doing the same work as Boorse’s reference classes but without the problems that reference classes face. Consider my example at the beginning of this section; of milk teeth falling out as opposed to normal teeth, if one clarifies the characteristics of milk teeth and permanent teeth we can simply say “one is diseased if members of their set of teeth which grew after the deciduous had fallen out, fall out of their own accord”. Thereby rendering it not applicable to the five year old with milk