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1 results

  • Epilogue

  • Vanessa Rampton, University of St Gallen
  • Book:
    Making Medical Progress
    Published online:
    12 December 2025
    Print publication:
    20 November 2025, pp 171-187
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  • Summary

    The epilogue considers one possible future incarnation of the idea of progress in medicine, namely progress as achieving sustainability. Despite the fact that environmental concerns have long been associated with reimagined ideas of progress, aspirations for sustainability remain underdeveloped in medicine. Nevertheless, this epilogue discusses the cases in which the concept of medical progress has been coupled with “sustainable” or “green” medicine. Visions of sustainable medical progress tend to presuppose a multidimensional concept of medical progress, call for expanding the time frame in which progress is assessed, and posit environmental limits as constraints on open-ended progress. At the same time, few of these visions engage with the pluralistic nature of medical progress, preferring to understand measures that support a robust natural environment as intrinsically good for the health of individuals and societies, and broadly aligned with the goals of conventional medicine.