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Doctors, scientists, and patients have long grappled with the dubious nature of “certainty” in medical practice. To help navigate the chaos caused by ongoing bodily change we rely on scientific reductions and deductions. We take what we know now and make best guesses about what will be. But bodies in flux always outpace the human gaze. Particularly in cancer care, processes deep within our bodies are at work long before we even know where to look. In the face of constant biological and technological change, how do medical professionals ultimately make decisions about care?

Bodies in Flux explores the inventive ways humans and nonhumans work together to manufacture medical evidence. Each chapter draws on rhetorical theory to investigate a specific scientific method for negotiating medical uncertainty in cancer care, including evidential visualization, assessment, synthesis, and computation. Case studies unveil how doctors rely on visuals when deliberating about a patient’s treatment options, how members of the FDA use inferential statistics to predict a drug’s effectiveness, how researchers synthesize hundreds of clinical trials into a single evidence-based recommendation, and how genetic testing companies compute and commoditize human health. Teston concludes by advocating for an ethic of care that pushes back against the fetishization of certainty—an ethic of care that honors human fragility and bodily flux.

Emerging from the tradition of Marshall, Knight, Keynes, and Shackle, Time, Ignorance, and Uncertainty in Economic Models is concerned with the character of formal economic analysis when the notions of logical or mechanical time and probabilistic uncertainty and the relatively complete knowledge basis it requires, are replaced, respectively, by historical time, and nonprobabilistic uncertainty and ignorance. Examining that analytical character by constructing and exploring particular models, this book emphasizes doing actual economic analysis in a framework of historical time, nonprobabilistic uncertainty, and ignorance.
Donald W. Katzner begins with an extensive investigation of the distinction between potential surprise and probability. He presents a modified version of Shackle's model of decision-making in ignorance and examines in considerable detail its "comparative statics" and operationality properties. The meaning of aggregation and simultaneity under these conditions is also explored, and Shackle's model is applied to the construction of models of the consumer, the firm, microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Katzner concludes with discussions of the roles of history, hysteresis, and empirical investigation in economic inquiry.
Time, Ignorance, and Uncertainty in Economic Models will be of interest to economists and others engaged in the study of uncertainty, probability, aggregation, and simultaneity. Those interested in the microeconomics of consumer and firm behavior, general equilibrium, and macroeconomics will also benefit from this book.
Donald W. Katzner is Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts.