The Distressed Body: Rethinking Illness, Imprisonment, and Healing

Description

Bodily pain and distress come in many forms. They can well up from within at times of serious illness, but the body can also be subjected to harsh treatment from outside. The medical system is often cold and depersonalized, and much worse are conditions experienced by prisoners in our age of mass incarceration, and by animals trapped in our factory farms. In this pioneering book, Drew Leder offers bold new ways to rethink how we create and treat distress, clearing the way for more humane social practices. Leder draws on literary examples, clinical and philosophical sources, his medical training, and his own struggle with chronic pain. He levies a challenge to the capitalist and Cartesian models that rule modern medicine. Similarly, he looks at the root paradigms of our penitentiary and factory farm systems and the way these produce distressed bodies, asking how such institutions can be reformed. Writing with coauthors ranging from a prominent cardiologist to long-term inmates, he explores alternative environments that can better humanize—even spiritualize—the way we treat one another, offering a very different vision of medical, criminal justice, and food systems. Ultimately Leder proposes not just new answers to important bioethical questions but new ways of questioning accepted concepts and practices. Contents......Page 8 Introduction......Page 10 Part 1. Illness and Treatment: Phenomenological Investigations......Page 20 1. Rethinking Illness: Philoctetes’ Exile......Page 22 2. Rethinking Pain: The Paradoxical Problem......Page 33 3. Rethinking Touch: How Then Does It Heal?......Page 51 4. Rethinking Pills: Fantasies, Realities, Possibilities......Page 65 5. Rethinking Clinical Practice: Toward a More Materialistic Medicine......Page 79 Part 2. Medicine and Bioethics: Hermeneutical Reflections......Page 94 6. Rethinking Diagnosis: The Many Texts of Medicine......Page 96 7. Rethinking Bioethics: Questioning Our Answers—and Our Questions......Page 115 8. Rethinking Organ Transplants: Whose Body, What Body?......Page 129 Part 3. Discarded and Recovered Bodies: Animals and Prisoners......Page 154 9. Rethinking Factory Farms: Old McDonald’s Had a What?......Page 156 10. Rethinking Imprisonment: The Life-World of the Incarcerated......Page 171 11. Rethinking Prisons: The Enlightened (and Endarkened) Prison......Page 192 12. Rethinking Prisoners and Animals: “They’re Animals” and Their Animals......Page 205 13. Rethinking Humans and/as Animals: The Art of Shape-Shifting......Page 220 Acknowledgments......Page 242 Notes......Page 246 Bibliography......Page 272 Index......Page 288