Vanessa Rampton, "Making Medical Progress: History of a Contested Idea" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: New Books Network

Episode: Vanessa Rampton, "Making Medical Progress: History of a Contested Idea" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Aired: February 15, 2026
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Dr. Vanessa Rampton

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Overview

In this episode, Dr. Miranda Melcher interviews Dr. Vanessa Rampton about her book Making Medical Progress: History of a Contested Idea. The discussion explores the origins, transformations, and continuing debates around the concept of “medical progress.” Rampton traces how the idea has evolved from ancient times through the Enlightenment, World War II, and up to the present day, emphasizing its deep entanglement with philosophical, technological, ethical, and social dimensions. The conversation also addresses whose interests are served by “progress,” patient empowerment, and justice, as well as how history can help critically unpack contemporary claims about breakthrough medical advancements.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Intellectual and Practical Origins of the Project

[02:43–05:09]

• Rampton’s Background: Vanessa Rampton outlines her philosophical interest in concepts like freedom, justice, and especially “progress.” She was struck by how medicine is often held up as the quintessential example of progress in history, compared to other more contested domains (e.g., politics).
  • “Medicine may be the one field where we can talk about progress.”
• Academic Trajectory: The project began with a fellowship allowing her to take a new direction, applying her interest in progress to the medical field.

2. The Historical Emergence of “Medical Progress”

[05:19–09:19]

• Ancient to Enlightenment Contexts: Before the Enlightenment, people didn’t conceptualize “medical progress” as we do; terms like “improvement” were present but did not connote the modern sense of progress.
  • “Medicine has never been...something that's unified, that's had a consistent mandate over time, or any stable standard for which we can measure progress.” — Rampton [05:42]
• Role of Religion: In medieval Christianity, health was subordinate to eternal life—limiting the focus on medical improvement.
• Enlightenment Shift: The 18th century’s confidence in human potential and breaking with religious constraints fostered a vision of potentially limitless medical progress, despite mismatch with actual technological achievements at the time.

3. The Technological Breakthroughs and World War II

[09:19–12:24]

• Impact of the War: WWII and the nuclear era marked a major rupture: technological miracles (atomic power, vaccines, organ transplants) colored expectations of medical progress.
  • “If there's a technological breakthrough, it tends to be associated with very high hopes for medical progress.” — Rampton [10:01]
• Political & Military Drivers: Investment in scientific medicine paralleled Cold War aims—keeping citizens healthy was as much about political stability as public health.

4. Moral Responsibility and the Rise of Bioethics

[12:24–16:13]

• New Ethical Questions: As breakthroughs accumulated (e.g., open heart surgery, antibiotics), so too did concerns about the consequences and responsibilities of medical innovation.
  • “There was a new awareness...on behalf of physicists of the moral weight of their innovations...It was somewhat later that biologists started to talk about their innovations as potentially having the same moral weight and potential for harm.” — Rampton [12:24]
• Shift from Paternalism: The 1960s and 70s saw a move from treating patients as passive recipients to viewing them as active agents. Paul Ramsey’s The Patient as Person (1970) signaled this change.
  • “Not just about better techniques applied in a paternalistic manner...the patient should have a say about what happens to them in care.” — Rampton [16:40]

5. The Entanglement with Social Justice

[18:26–22:26]

• Beyond the Individual: Ideas of medical progress interacted with social movements—medicine as a tool for broader social change, e.g., addressing health disparities due to capitalism or class.
• Universal Health & Persistent Inequities: Even as universal health care spread in some countries, outcomes remained unequal, prompting questions about who truly benefits from progress.
  • “Our medical techniques are improving...Universal health care was...becoming available...But health outcomes remained different across social groups.” — Rampton [19:08]
• Social Determinants of Health: “Medical progress” became linked to addressing systemic factors like education, work, and living conditions, not just medical technologies.

6. Ongoing Tensions and Debates

[22:26–24:32]

• What Gets Prioritized: Should resources go to expensive cutting-edge therapies or wider-reaching preventative measures?
  • “There can be tensions between expensive medical treatment for a single patient and medicine that aspires to provide health to the largest number of patients possible.” — Rampton [22:50]
• Persistent Debate: These trade-offs and disagreements about “what kind of medical progress we want” remain unresolved.

7. Visions for the Future

[24:42–27:03]

• Sustainability & Environment: Rampton suggests that future visions could revisit ancient ideas of harmony between individual and environment—medical progress as “sustainability.”
  • “A healthy individual depends on...harmony with a healthy environment...not a very prominent idea, but one I'd be hopeful about going forward.” — Rampton [24:42]
• Current Emphases: Despite the potential, “medical progress” remains heavily associated with high-tech frontiers (AI, genomics), often at the expense of social factors.
  • “If you ask any AI-driven large language model what is medical progress, something like equitable health access is not going to be on the list...” — Rampton [24:42]
• History as a Guide: History shows that “there are always many possible futures at any one historical moment.”

8. Personal Reactions to Writing the Book

[27:03–29:08]

• Strong Opinions: Rampton was struck by how deeply people personally identify with or resist critiques of “medical progress,” often sharing their own survival stories as evidence for its value.
  • “People have very strong opinions...if I talked about a critical view of medical progress, people would take me aside to say, ‘But I wouldn't be here without it!’” — Rampton [27:25]
• Soft Critique: Her approach is not to deny technological gains but to contextualize and complicate the one-sided narrative.

9. Final Reflections & Takeaways

[29:08–31:37]

• Critical Tools: The book aims to help readers think about which dimensions of health are emphasized (physical, psychological, social, environmental) in any given claim about “progress.”
  • “Even as we're all broadly in favor of medical progress, we just have to think carefully about the claims any one person is making...often...only talking about one particular dimension of health.” — Rampton [29:08]
• Power Dynamics: Readers are encouraged to consider whose interests are served—and which aspects are ignored—when “medical progress” is invoked.

10. Rampton’s Next Project

[31:49–33:45]

• Assisted Dying & End of Life: Currently, Rampton studies assisted dying, exploring how cultural representations (films, books) shape beliefs and practices, and how notions of “progress” appear in the context of death and dying.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Medicine may be the one field where we can talk about progress.” — Rampton [02:55]
• “Medical progress...never been something that's unified, that's had a consistent mandate...or any stable standard.” — Rampton [05:42]
• “This idea of really a breakthrough technology, a nuclear era...fed into ideas about medical progress.” — Rampton [10:01]
• “There was a new awareness...biomedical research started to talk about [their] technologies as potentially having the same moral weight and also the same potential for harm.” — Rampton [12:24]
• “The patient as an autonomous agent...this was associated with the rise of bioethics.” — Rampton [16:40]
• “Universal health care was...becoming available, but health outcomes remained different across...groups.” — Rampton [19:08]
• “These tensions...persist and...don't really get resolved.” — Rampton [22:50]
• “I close the book by talking about a vision of medical progress as sustainability.” — Rampton [24:42]
• “History shows that there are...always many possible futures at any one historical moment.” — Rampton [24:42]
• “People were often interested and kind of compelled to share their stories...how I was interested in bringing a critical or reflective view to medical progress.” — Rampton [27:25]
• “Any kind of narrow concept...if it's an intervention that's powerful on the biophysical aspect...what about these other dimensions?” — Rampton [29:08]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction to the Book & Project Origins — [01:31–05:18]
• Historical Foundations of “Medical Progress” — [05:19–09:19]
• Technological Shifts and WWII — [09:19–12:24]
• Rise of Bioethics and Patient Empowerment — [16:20–18:26]
• Medical Progress and Social Justice — [18:26–22:26]
• Contemporary Debates and Future Directions — [24:32–27:03]
• Personal Reflections and Project’s Reception — [27:03–29:08]
• Key Critiques and Reader Takeaways — [29:08–31:37]
• Rampton’s Current Work and Closing — [31:49–34:01]

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Conclusion

This thoughtful conversation provides a nuanced overview of how “medical progress” has always been a fraught, contested idea, shaped by shifting knowledge, ethics, technologies, and social movements. Dr. Rampton encourages historical and critical attention to the different dimensions and interests at play whenever “progress” is invoked—reminding us that the future of medicine is open, shaped by the choices and values we bring to it.

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Transcript

[Dr. Vanessa Rampton]

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher. And I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Vanessa Rampton about her book titled Making Medical A History of a Contested Idea, published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. Now, I think many of us, including those who are not medical doctors, I certainly am not one, are familiar with the idea of medical progress. Right. Whether we see it in a headline going yay, this breakthrough has made medical progress or whatever it might be, that's a phrase that kind of has crossed out of just being a niche specialist term to being one that many of us, maybe even all of us kind of have an idea of what it means. What actually does it mean though, right? Like medical progress. Progress towards what? Based on what? Who gets to decide? Like as soon as we start to sort of pause and think for a second about this phrase that we think we know what it means, a whole bunch of questions open up and Vanessa has investigated. So, Vanessa, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about your work.

[Dr. Vanessa Rampton]

Hi, Miranda, thanks so much for inviting me here and for reading my book.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, I am very pleased that we get to talk more about it. But before we get into the details, can you maybe Introduce yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write a book focused on examining the idea of medical progress.

[Dr. Vanessa Rampton]

Yeah, of course. So I'm an academic. I work at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. And right now I'm affiliated with McGill University in Montreal. And academically, I'd always been interested in ideas, philosophical ideas like freedom, progress, justice, and how these ideas are not fixed and static, but change depending on the context in which they're discussed and whether that's a different historical period or different place or a different group discussing the idea. So these were things I've been thinking about and questions like, what is historical progress? Can even think of that? What might political progress mean? And medicine kind of kept coming up for me as an example, and it went something like this. Well, you know, it's so contested to think of a generalized form of progress. You know, we, we have to be thinking about progress for whom? But medicine may be the one field where we can talk about progress. So I had these different ways in which I kept being pointed back to medicine as this kind of case study. Well, if you want to look for progress in history, look at medicine. And that was the kind of intellectual background with which I came to this project. And concretely, I received a fellowship. It was an early career fellowship that gave me the protected time necessary to write the book and also was willing to have someone take on a project that was not just a follow up project on what they'd been doing before. Kind of a move sideways. And so for me, this was a good fit because while I had looked at the idea of progress, different contexts, I looked at Eastern Europe and other examples, but I hadn't looked at the medical case study before. And this book. Yeah, came out of that fellowship time.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

That's very helpful as an introduction to the sort of intellectual origins of the project as well as the practical ones. Right. And all projects come from that combination.

[Dr. Vanessa Rampton]

Absolutely.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Getting into then, kind of what it actually means, you know, starting to unpick this idea of medical progress. If we look sort of before World War II, what is it even a concept at that point? What does it mean before we get into kind of mass war and what that does to things? What is medical progress? Is that even a thing people would.

[Dr. Vanessa Rampton]

Say, yeah, that's a really good question and one that I find a bit hard to answer just because it's such a broad period of history. But I think if I start by thinking about why I wanted to have a historical examination of medical progress in the book, and that's what the first chapter does, goes right back to antiquity and kind of traces ideas that are relevant, at least to progress through centuries. What I wanted to show was that medicine has never been kind of a. It's never been something that's unified, that's had a consistent mandate over time, or any stable standard for which we can measure progress. So that is kind of a relativistic argument. And when you say, well, did people, you know, did they think about it, did they talk about it? I think for a long time, not in ways that we would recognize as medical progress. There were different words that were used, words that might have meant something like improvement, but were not progress per se. But there was a change, and I situate that change in the Enlightenment, so 18th century, where a new kind of like casting off of what were previously seen as limits imposed by religion on progress. And this had really profound repercussions for how health was understood and the possibilities of medical progress. So to give an example, if in medieval Christianity, a person's health or like health during their earthly life was seen as somehow secondary to like a more substantive eternal life that was waiting for them. If health was seen as something that was given by God, there was no real need to, you know, think of a scientific idea of progress as key to well being. And this did change in history. And what you can see is once that vision of health and illness changed, and this is a complicated process. I don't want to summarize too much, but a new vision of the kind of potentially limitless nature of medical progress took hold. Yeah. And what I think is interesting is it did so at a time when medical technologies were having nothing like success that we might associate with technologies today. So there were these ideas and very ambitious ideas about the potential of medical progress and medical technology, but without any of the results. So for a long time there was a disjunct between what people thought medical progress could offer, but the realities on the ground.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, that's really interesting to see kind of all these ideas sort of mixing. And not just the ideas. Right. As you said, the technology itself, you might have all these concepts of what improvement looks like, but the medicine at this point is really not kind of backing that up. But if we move sort of forward into a time when the technology really is kind of starting to be able to do a lot of things that would have been unimaginable before that, Right. By World War II, by the sort of early mid 20th century, there is a lot of stuff that can actually happen. Is that why we start to see sort of medical progress as an idea getting a lot more excitement around then. Or how else might we understand this moment?

[Dr. Vanessa Rampton]

Well, one of the things that I found really fascinating when I was researching this book is the extent to which World War II seems to be kind of a break for medical progress. And at first glance, this was to me somehow surprising. But I think this idea of really a breakthrough technology, so a nuclear era, where there was this really a kind of very marked form of technological progress. This fed into ideas about medical progress specifically. And this I found was the first really important instance for that kind of crossover. But it comes up again and again, like if there's a. Technological breakthroughs tend to be associated with very high hopes for medical progress specifically. And in the case of the immediate kind of post war period, so middle of the 20th century, there was also a sense of, well, medicine could benefit from atomic technologies. There were all these ideas about the eradication of disease at the time, but also a sense that we need to kind of keep citizens healthy, keep them ready to fight in the Cold War. And this emphasis that was put on scientific medicine at the time was also, I think, a way of keeping a way in which, you know, spending on science and on technology was not directly leading to war between the great great powers, but was very much a political and to some extent a military objective.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

That's really interesting to think about. Kind of who was being excited? Was everyone. I mean, if the military's leading on something, it could be that kind of other parts of society are like, yeah, okay, that sounds really cool. Or do we see criticisms even at this stage around. Hang on a second, what do we mean by progress?

[Dr. Vanessa Rampton]

Yeah, that's. That's a really good question, I think. I mean, there were various kind of. I don't know if breakthroughs is the right word, but the first open heart surgery, for example, was in the early 50s. In 1952. There were better vaccines, there was. Synthetic penicillin was developed. So there were these kind of. There was this widespread sense that I think was. Was shared of, okay, there are these, you know, new technologies and techniques that are act. That are becoming tangible and trickling down to some extent at least. But there was as well probably a new awareness of the responsibilities that came with medical progress as well. I think there had been a kind of a new awareness on behalf of physicists of the moral weight of their innovations. And you can see this historically and how it's discussed in conferences at the time that it was somewhat later that biologists, people in biomedical research started to talk about their innovations, their new technologies as potentially having the same moral weight and also the same potential for harm that other technologies, again thinking of physics in particular had had previously. So that was a sense, and I think that was quite shared of okay, we can do these new things like first heart transplant was 1967, but should we, where does it stop and what are the issues for patients? Are we just kind of, you know, going ahead as fast as we can or at what point do we need to take stock and maybe, yeah, also think about how to protect patients within the context of this fast changing technology, something that still remains quite relevant. Ultimately Eczema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with ebglis, a once monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema after an initial four month or longer dosing phase. About four in ten people taking empglis achieved itch relief in clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks, and most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah. This idea of patients being part of the equation is something I definitely want us to talk about because it is, as you said, around protecting patients, but also empowering patients. Right. Very much comes up and is very relevant still now. So how does that sort of intersect with these ideas of medical progress?

[Dr. Vanessa Rampton]

So, yeah, that's a very, I think, kind of strong historical thread that you can trace at least back to the 1960s, but also beyond when there's the idea that it's not just about better techniques kind of applied in a paternalistic manner to patients, but the patients should have a say about what happens to them in care. And this was bolstered by different interventions. Paul Ramsey wrote a book called the Patient as person in 1970. And while this sounds like completely banal today, at the time there was a shift towards understanding the patient as an autonomous agent with more of a say in what happens to them in care. And this was associated with the rise of bioethics as a kind of interdisciplinary field in the 1960s. And. And the idea that medical innovation actually had to. To work. Yeah. Had to. Had to work for. For patients and be in line with their choices. So that was one way in which medical progress kind of became distanced from, well, more knowledge, more science almost for the sake of it, but to shifting an emphasis to, well, okay, what is actually good for patients.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah. Which is obviously a really important emphasis to have that isn't just about kind of individual patients. Right. You talk about, for example, sort of entire social justice movement, sort of informed ideas that go from the individual patient to kind of more systemically. What gets prioritized, whose voices get heard. One thing, though, I was really interested in the book is that it's not as straightforward to say kind of social justice doesn't like medical progress. And it's sort of one on one side and one on the other. Like, it's much more nuanced. So can you maybe give us some examples of ways that social justice sort of informed ideas have tried to work with the idea of medical progress or expand it rather than just kind of saying, know.

[Dr. Vanessa Rampton]

Sure, yeah. And I think that's one of the fascinating things about medical progress. Right. Is that it's this very capacious term ultimately. And you can. You can fit in ideas of patient empowerment. You can fit in a commitment to social justice, which is, again, just in terms of the history, I think it. It does go back at least to the 19th century and. And kind of socialist, Marxist ideas that, well, Capitalism is having actually terrible effects on the health of workers and there always has been for a long time anyways, this sense that medicine should be able to address the health of all citizens in a society. And this was again another shift in perspective that the concept of medical progress took over time. Something that became, I think, well, that bubbled up at different times. That was associated with even the founding of the World Health Organization in the mid 20th century and then became in a subsequent period more associated with, with new knowledge. And that, that was based on the, the insight that, okay, we have these, you know, our medical techniques are improving. Universal health care was slowly becoming available to more, more citizens in the second half of the 20th century. The US is an exception in that regard. But you know, universal healthcare and UK and Canada was broadly available. And at the same time health outcomes remained different across different social groups. So higher income neighborhoods and groups consistently had better health than lower ones. So there was a sense of, okay, well we're, you know, there's this progress but, but who is it reaching and, and why? And there have been quite successful attempts to link an idea of medical progress to what we call today the social determinants of health. So these are the broad, like the broader conditions prior to accessing health in a medical setting, but that impact health. So things like where you live and your level of education, where you work. And these are shown to be very important for determining health levels, mortality rates, but they're not taken into account if you have a narrow kind of technology focused idea of progress. And yeah, that linking of medical progress and social justice kind of came out of that effort to recalibrate once again.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, I like that idea of recalibrating. That definitely kind of gives a sense of sort of trying to make this work and different options being sort of tested. What were some of the outcomes of that? Like, did any of, did that kind of make more people sort of accept ideas of medical progress or did it sort of push at things and try things, but kind of not really address some of these tensions?

[Dr. Vanessa Rampton]

I think, you know, now if we kind of fast forward to today where there are ongoing conversations about, yeah, about which vision of medical progress is, you know, the most valid one. What should we be funding? Should it be a kind of a preventative medicine focused on the health, the disadvantaged communities? Should it be cutting edge, expensive technologies that are maybe available to a few people in the first instance because they're very expensive, but with the understanding that that will become more democratic in the long run? So I think, as I see It I think these tensions, potential tension between different ideas of medical progress persist and they, yeah, they're not, they don't really get resolved. But I think when we talk about the different instantiations of medical progress then we see more clearly some of the trade offs that there are between them. Like they're just can be tensions between expensive medical treatment for a single patient and then a medicine that aspires to provide health to the largest number of patients possible. And yeah, these are these ongoing societal discussions about what kind of medical progress do we want ultimately.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

And these of course are not questions that are resolved.

[Dr. Vanessa Rampton]

Right.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

This is an ongoing thing to be thinking about. So what could this look like going forward?

[Dr. Vanessa Rampton]

Yeah, so I mean these are the things that I love to think about. I will say I think history or as I describe it in my book, it gives us some tools for understanding, know how we got to where we are today, but you know, doesn't allow us to ultimately to predict the future. I do, I close the book by talking about a vision of medical progress as sustainability. So one that takes environmental considerations into account. It's actually based on a very old idea of health that you can you find echoes of in ancient Greece. The idea that a healthy individual depends on is kind of in harmony with a healthy environment. And this is, you know, not a very prominent idea in terms of how we might think of medical progress. But you know, it's one that I'd be hopeful about going forward also. I think a medicine that is more attuned to social justice issues, we also have cause to be hopeful about. I, yeah, but it is, I guess I'm not a pessimist but as much as a realist, if you kind of think about, okay, what does medical progress mean when we talk about it today, it really is associated with, yeah, this kind of cutting edge technologies. If you ask any AI driven large language model like what is medical progress, something like equitable health access is not going to be on the list of the devices that they give you as epitomizing medical. So I just say that because that's, I think, you know, generative AI genomics, these are the fields where a lot of, you know, attention and funding is going. But history shows that there are, you know, many, always many possible futures at any one historical moment.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, no, absolutely. We'll have to kind of continue thinking about this and sort of see what develops going forward. But looking backwards for a moment, I wonder if you can take us a bit into your process of kind of thinking about all of this. And putting this history together. Was there anything that really surprised you in unpacking all of this and figuring out how to communicate it in the book?

[Dr. Vanessa Rampton]

Well, I think one thing I was surprised of, and you mentioned it in your introduction, was the extent to which people have very strong opinions about medical progress. It's something. Yeah, it's the nature of the term. Right. We've heard it, heard about it. We have personal experience of the healthcare system. And one thing I found was that people were often interested and kind of felt compelled to share. Share their stories with me in the sense of if I, you know, talked about this project and how I was interested in bringing a somewhat kind of critical or reflective view to medical progress, I had people really take me aside to say, yes, but something like, yes, I've had a cesarean section and you should know that my. My child or myself, I would not be here today without medical progress. And there were these interesting moments where you kind of realize how. Yeah, a kind of a. A soft critique. That's what I'm doing. I'm not denying at all, like, the. The validity of technological progress, but I am trying to put it in context, but how. That there's a certain amount of resistance to that based on this very valid personal experience that people have. So that was something that I kind of came across and that was. Yeah, always led to interesting discussions.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, I'm sure it definitely does. Thank you for adding that to our discussion here. Is there anything further we haven't discussed. Discussed yet that you hope readers take away from all of this?

[Dr. Vanessa Rampton]

Yeah, just to follow up on the previous point, I think I hope it gives some kind of tools or strategies for thinking critically about medical progress. And I think, speaking broadly, no one wants to be sick or to die. So we do have a kind of a shared agreement about the value of this concept. And, you know, our world is pretty fractured right now. In some sense, this is a rare and a valuable agreement about something that's important to individuals and important at a societal level. But even as we're all broadly in favor of medical progress, I think we just have to think carefully about the claims that any one person, person or any one entity is making on behalf of medical progress. And this is because often any kind of really ambitious claim on behalf of the concept is only talking or only linking back to one particular dimension of health. So something I, you know, kind of do in the book is to say, well, health, at least as I understand it, has these multiple dimensions. I mean, it's. There's physical health but psychological health, social. Social relationships, which, as we know more and more feed into health and environmental health and, and any kind of narrow concept. Again, I think technology illustrates this quite well. But if it's a intervention that's going to be very powerful on the biophysical aspect of health, well, what about these other dimensions? What are the implications of that for a social dimension of health, for example? So I hope that highlighting these different dimensions of health and of medical progress can help readers be a bit more aware of the power dynamics behind specific claims. Yeah, claiming medical progress and associating it with a particular vision of what we should do to attain health.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I mean, plenty to keep thinking about. So is this the sort of thing you're continuing to work on or. I don't know if you have any current projects you want to give us a sneak preview of, even if they're entirely unrelated?

[Dr. Vanessa Rampton]

Sure. So I right now work on assisted dying. So end of life issues. And the end of life was kind of. It was a case study, a short case study in my book. I think it's really an interesting life phase for thinking about progress. It's one in which all the incredible possibilities for technological progress run out. Once there's no possibility of a cure, then can be the other forms of progress are allowed to bubble up, become more visible. And the work I do is, with a group in Switzerland called Assisted Lab, is to look at how different cultural artifacts, whether films or books, documentaries, how they influence our shared beliefs about assisted dying, the value of it, the problems around it. And so, yeah, while I've, as I said at the beginning, I'm interested in these ideas and their contexts. And for me right now, these kind of artistic interventions, these cultural productions, films and so on, these are the contexts in which I'm examining these questions around an assisted death. So, yeah, slightly different context, but still a lot of connections with the ideas in terms of who progress, also in terms of patient choice, patient freedom, and ultimately in terms of justice, what does a good death look like for people coming from very different backgrounds?

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, definitely. Obviously a different project, but as you said, some very clear connections to the book we've been discussing. So if anyone wants to learn more, it is titled Making Medical History of a Contested Idea, published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. Vanessa, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Dr. Vanessa Rampton]

Thank you. Miranda, thank you for your questions. Thank you for having me here. Well, the holidays have come and gone once again, but if you've forgotten to get that special someone in your life a gift, well, mint Mobile is extending their holiday offer of half off unlimited with wireless. So here's the idea. You get it now. You call it an early present for next year. What do you have to lose? Give it a [e-mail] Switch limited time.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

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