A Body Worth Defending - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook A Body Worth Defending write by Ed Cohen. This book was released on 2009-10-16. A Body Worth Defending available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Biological immunity as we know it does not exist until the late nineteenth century. Nor does the premise that organisms defend themselves at the cellular or molecular levels. For nearly two thousand years “immunity,” a legal concept invented in ancient Rome, serves almost exclusively political and juridical ends. “Self-defense” also originates in a juridico-political context; it emerges in the mid-seventeenth century, during the English Civil War, when Thomas Hobbes defines it as the first “natural right.” In the 1880s and 1890s, biomedicine fuses these two political precepts into one, creating a new vital function, “immunity-as-defense.” In A Body Worth Defending, Ed Cohen reveals the unacknowledged political, economic, and philosophical assumptions about the human body that biomedicine incorporates when it recruits immunity to safeguard the vulnerable living organism. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s writings about biopolitics and biopower, Cohen traces the migration of immunity from politics and law into the domains of medicine and science. Offering a genealogy of the concept, he illuminates a complex of thinking about modern bodies that percolates through European political, legal, philosophical, economic, governmental, scientific, and medical discourses from the mid-seventeenth century through the twentieth. He shows that by the late nineteenth century, “the body” literally incarnates modern notions of personhood. In this lively cultural rumination, Cohen argues that by embracing the idea of immunity-as-defense so exclusively, biomedicine naturalizes the individual as the privileged focus for identifying and treating illness, thereby devaluing or obscuring approaches to healing situated within communities or collectives.
Homeopathy and the "Bacteriological Revolution" 1880-1895
Homeopathy and the "Bacteriological Revolution" 1880-1895 - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Homeopathy and the "Bacteriological Revolution" 1880-1895 write by Carol‐Ann Galego. This book was released on 2020-09-30. Homeopathy and the "Bacteriological Revolution" 1880-1895 available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. In her study, Carol-Ann Galego applies Michel Foucault's genealogical method to modern medicine's protracted war on pathogens. She excavates the early struggles that bacteriology generally, and in particular its articulation of germ theory, encountered before achieving widespread acceptance. The focus of her analysis is the responses of homeopaths in Germany and England to developments in bacteriology between 1880 and 1895 - fifteen eventful years of the "bacteriological revolution" that overlap with the fifth cholera epidemic of the nineteenth century. During these formative years, the convergence of bacteriologists' isolation and cultivation of microbes with medical efforts to quell the ravages of cholera gave rise to the now predominant understanding of infectious disease as an invasion of pathogens. At the time, however, such an antagonistic response to the threat of infectious disease was anything but unanimous. As Galego demonstrates, the nuanced understandings of disease etiology that homeopaths developed during these years, alongside their efforts to confront cholera, construct a different narrative, one that provides a fascinating counterhistory to the development of modern bacteriology and its alienating relations to microbial life.
The Pandemic Visual Regime
The Pandemic Visual Regime - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Pandemic Visual Regime write by Julia Ramírez-Blanco. This book was released on 2023-11-09. The Pandemic Visual Regime available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle.
On Learning to Heal
On Learning to Heal - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook On Learning to Heal write by Ed Cohen. This book was released on 2022-11-18. On Learning to Heal available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. At thirteen, Ed Cohen was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease—a chronic, incurable condition that nearly killed him in his early twenties. At his diagnosis, his doctors told him that the best he could hope for would be periods of remission. Unfortunately, doctors never mentioned healing as a possibility. In On Learning to Heal, Cohen draws on fifty years of living with Crohn’s to consider how Western medicine’s turn from an “art of healing” toward a “science of medicine” deeply affects both medical practitioners and their patients. He demonstrates that although medicine can now offer many seemingly miraculous therapies, medicine is not and has never been the only way to enhance healing. Exploring his own path to healing, he argues that learning to heal requires us to desire and value healing as a vital possibility. With this book, Cohen advocates reviving healing’s role for all those whose lives are touched by illness.
A Family History of Illness
A Family History of Illness - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook A Family History of Illness write by Brett L. Walker. This book was released on 2018-03-15. A Family History of Illness available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. While in the ICU with a near-fatal case of pneumonia, Brett Walker was asked, “Do you have a family history of illness?”—a standard and deceptively simple question that for Walker, a professional historian, took on additional meaning and spurred him to investigate his family’s medical past. In this deeply personal narrative, he constructs a history of his body to understand his diagnosis with a serious immunological disorder, weaving together his dying grandfather’s sneaking a cigarette in a shed on the family’s Montana farm, blood fractionation experiments in Europe during World War II, and nineteenth-century cholera outbreaks that ravaged small American towns as his ancestors were making their way west. A Family History of Illness is a gritty historical memoir that examines the body’s immune system and microbial composition as well as the biological and cultural origins of memory and history, offering a startling, fresh way to view the role of history in understanding our physical selves. In his own search, Walker soon realizes that this broader scope is more valuable than a strictly medical family history. He finds that family legacies shape us both physically and symbolically, forming the root of our identity and values, and he urges us to renew our interest in the past or risk misunderstanding ourselves and the world around us.
