Battlefield Body of Illness Narratives

Abstract

The modern western medical body is an object of discourse, of examination and diagnosis for and by the doctor. Modern western medicine is an institutional practice of seeing, saying about, and doing things to, the body. The doctor is the institutionally and legally legitimated figure authorised to speak the truth of the body. The body is mute, or speechless, until and unless it is made to speak by the doctor. The patient may be invited to contribute to this process, to describe symptoms, to relate the course of a disease, but his or her participation is peripheral; his or her role as person is secondary to his or her body, to his or her constitution as ‘the body’. That the medical body also happens to be the patient’s body is coincidental, and accidental. In the process of speaking the truth of the body the patient’s body, and voice, is often denied, ignored or suppressed.