A New History of Identity

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

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2. Prologue

   • David Armstrong

   Pages 1-4

3. Constructing the Body

   • David Armstrong

   Pages 5-16

4. Negotiating Death

   • David Armstrong

   Pages 17-24

5. Discovering Origins

   • David Armstrong

   Pages 25-35

6. Making the Body Move

   • David Armstrong

   Pages 37-46

7. Creating a Social Identity

   • David Armstrong

   Pages 47-55

8. Invoking Subjectivity

   • David Armstrong

   Pages 57-70

9. Instilling Agency

   • David Armstrong

   Pages 71-83

10. Confessing Death

    • David Armstrong

    Pages 85-97

11. Dimensionalizing Identity

    • David Armstrong

    Pages 99-108

12. Becoming at Risk

    • David Armstrong

    Pages 109-116

13. Death of the Old Hospital

    • David Armstrong

    Pages 117-131

14. Birth of Primary Care

    • David Armstrong

    Pages 133-146

15. Ecce homo

    • David Armstrong

    Pages 147-157

16. Identity of the Observer

    • David Armstrong

    Pages 159-173

17. The Subject of Knowledge

    • David Armstrong

    Pages 175-185

18. A Note on Methodology

    • David Armstrong

    Pages 187-198

19. Back Matter

    Pages 199-213

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Medical texts provide a powerful means of accessing contemporary perceptions of illness and through them assumptions about the nature of the body and identity. By mapping these perceptions, from their nineteenth-century focus on illness located in a biological body through to their 'discovery' of the psycho-social patient of the late twentieth century, a history of identity, both physical and psychological, is revealed.

• care
• identity
• methodology
• nature

DAVID ARMSTRONG is Reader in Sociology as applied to Medicine in the Guy's, King's and St Thomas' Medical School at King's College London. He has published widely on the sociology of medical knowledge, including Political Anatomy of the Body: Medical Knowledge in the Twentieth Century.

Policies and ethics