We are pleased to announce the publication of The New Modern Medicine by Jonathan Fuller (Oxford University Press, 2025). In this book, Fuller argues that contemporary scientific medicine has been reshaped into a “new modern medicine” by new disease patterns, new norms of evidence, and (above all) the centrality of epidemiological science to medical concepts and reasoning.

The book develops this picture through a systematic examination of what Fuller calls “epidemiological medicine”, contrasting it with the earlier model of “laboratory medicine”, and using this contrast to sharpen a set of core philosophical problems facing contemporary healthcare. In the Introduction, Fuller motivates the project by identifying seven such problems, including molecular reductionism, multifactorial aetiology, chronicity and asymptomaticity, evidence hierarchies, the meaning of medical risk, external validity of clinical trials, and biased evidence.

Across four parts—The New Modern Medicine, Disease, Evidence, and Epidemiological Medicine—the book ranges from theories of disease and classification to medical evidence and prediction, the interpretation of risk, problems of extrapolation, and therapeutic scepticism, before culminating in an extended discussion of twenty-first-century medicine and its competing self-understandings.

The New Modern Medicine is available open access – you can download a PDF from the publisher’s page. Fuller notes that this open-access availability was supported by a University of Johannesburg research associateship with CPEMPH.