Limit and vulnerability. Questions of care

This article aims to reflect on medical art in the light of the ethical-anthropological categories of limit and vulnerability. Medicine, in fact, is increasingly in danger of thinking and acting as an ally of the technosciences, navigating beyond the shores of the human and opening up unprecedented scenarios that radically alter the paradigm of care. The loss of the notion of limit as a positive ethical boundary leads to biomedical and biopolitical scenarios in which the medicalisation of existence risks rewriting the concept of health and illness. Hence the need and the attempt to show the importance of returning to medical scenarios to reflect on the human condition as marked by the limit and ontologically vulnerable. The itinerary we intend to pursue moves from Michel Foucault’s reflections on the transformation of the medical gaze in the contemporary age, to arrive at a philosophical reconstruction of the notion of vulnerability. A concept ennobled by the ethics of care, vulnerability, reread in the light of bioethical categories, makes it possible to re-qualify the relationship between doctor and patient. The testbed for a medical ethics that is authentically relational is human corporeity, which draws the boundary to regulate good therapeutic practices of care and treatment.