George Engel’s Epistemology of Clinical Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
George Engel's (1913-1999) biopsychosocial model, one of the most significant proposals for the renewal of medicine in the latter half of the 20th century, has been understood primarily as a multi-factorial approach to the etiology of disease and as a call to re-humanize clinical practice. This common reading of Engel's model misses the central aspect of his proposal, that the biopsychosocial model is an epistemology for clinical work. By stating the simple fact that the clinician is not dealing directly with a body, but first, and inevitably, with a person, Engel challenged the epistemology implicit in the classical clinical method-a method predicated on the possibility of direct access to the body. Framed in epistemological terms, the issue at stake is not the need to complement medical science with humane virtues, but rather to acknowledge that the object of clinical practice is not the body but the patient.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.074 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".