Abstract

If there is any value in the idea that disease is something other than the mere absence of health then that value must lie in the way that diseases are classified. This paper offers further development of a view advanced previously, the 'contrastive model' of disease: it develops the account to handle asymptomatic disease ; and in doing so it relates the model to a broadly biostatistical view of health. The developments are prompted by considering cancers featuring viruses as prominent causes, since these appear to amount to cases where the prescriptions of the contrastive model could be followed, but aren't. The resulting irrelevance objection claims that the contrastive model is irrelevant to medical science and practice. The paper seeks to rebut the irrelevance objection.