Month: September 2022

MAINSTREAM PATHOLOGY. “The history of medical thought reveals that the understanding of disease has oscillated back and forth between two opposing conceptions. According to the so-called physiological conception, diseases result from disturbances in the functional equilibrium of the body, and their cure reflects the harmonious restoration of this equilibrium. In contrast, the so-called ontological conception views diseases as foreign entities that enter the body, and their cure implies the expulsion of the intruders.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

DISEASES AS THINGS. “The ontological conception is aligned with substance ontology, as it regards diseases as particular things (or properties of things) that are discrete and exist independently of the body they infect, whereas the physiological conception is more congenial to process ontology, as it views diseases as temporally extended disruptions in the carefully regulated meshwork of interconnected processes that constitutes the body.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

CONCRETE PATHOGENS. “With the rise of medical microbiology in the late nineteenth century the ontological conception became the dominant theory of disease, and so it has remained, more or less, to the present day. The modern notion of a ‘pathogen’ is clearly derived from it, which accounts for why pathogens have long been considered a discrete category, distinguished from other microbes by their inherent capacity to cause disease in appropriate hosts.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

The fascinating stories of walls. View in LinkedIn

CONTEXTUAL PATHOGENS. “Pathogenicity may not be an intrinsic property of a microbe at all, but rather, as Méthot and Alizon (2015) argue, a contingent property afforded by the particular ecological context in which the microbe finds itself and by the complex and ever changing symbiotic relationship it maintains with its host.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

SYMBIOTIC SHIFT. “The traditional question ‘Is this microbe a pathogen?’ is gradually giving way to the question ‘Under what ecological conditions is this microbe likely to become a pathogen?’. This shift is partly being prompted by the discovery that microbes thought to be engaged in commensal or mutualistic relations with their host can become pathogenic (i.e. parasitic) as a result of changes in the host environment (this is the case for the microbes that make up the normal microbiota of the human gut, for instance).’ https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

MULTIPLE CONTEXTUAL ROLES. “Conversely, microbes that are usually pathogenic can end up protecting their host against more virulent parasites. Virulence itself, which refers to the degree of damage a pathogen is capable of inflicting on its host, is not a permanent property of the pathogen; it is arguably not even a property of the pathogen, but rather the outcome of a specific kind of interaction between the pathogen and its host.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

NEW THINKING. “The above considerations strongly suggest that there are no definite criteria by which we can unequivocally classify a particular microbe as a pathogen.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

PATHOLOGICAL PROCESS. “To attribute pathogenicity to an individual microbe is to commit an indefensible act of abstraction, as it implies ignoring the complex processual context that makes it possible. A microbe is not a thing or a substance, and pathogenicity is not an unchanging property that the microbe carries with it like an essence; it is rather a process, and as such it is to be expected that its characteristics will be found to be transient, context-dependent, historically contingent, and ever subject to ecological and evolutionary changes.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

NO DOG COLLAR. “We believe that being explicit about the metaphysical stance one takes to be right for biology is crucial if we are to prevent what Whitehead described as the ‘canalization of thought and observation within predetermined limits, based upon inadequate metaphysical assumptions dogmatically assumed’. Our aim in this essay has been to defend the metaphysical thesis that a process ontology is the right ontology for the living world.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn