A New History of Identity A Sociology of Medical Knowledge

by Armstrong, David E.

• ISBN13: 9780333968925
• ISBN10: 0333968921
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-09-06
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

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 19th century focus on illness located in a biological body through to their 'discovery' of the psycho-social patient of the late 20th century, a history of identity, both physical and psychological, is revealed.

Author Biography

David Armstrong is at the School of Medicine, King's College London.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Prologue	1	(4)
Constructing the Body	5	(12)
Sanitary science	7	(4)
Body boundaries	11	(6)
Negotiating Death	17	(8)
Pathological death	18	(2)
Disposal of the dead	20	(5)
Discovering Origins	25	(12)
The origin of life	25	(3)
Reconstructing causes of death	28	(3)
Analytic dimensions	31	(6)
Making the Body Move	37	(10)
Posture	38	(3)
Exercise	41	(6)
Creating a Social Identity	47	(10)
Inter-personal hygiene	48	(3)
A medicine of the social	51	(6)
Invoking Subjectivity	57	(14)
The clinical examination	58	(4)
An inchoate patient	62	(3)
Words and meanings	65	(3)
The space of subjectivity	68	(3)
Instilling Agency	71	(14)
The potential of control	71	(2)
Reactive behaviours	73	(2)
Experiments in intervention	75	(3)
Health behaviours	78	(1)
Using health services	79	(6)
Confessing Death	85	(14)
The secret and the lie	85	(4)
The biology of death	89	(4)
Analytic space	93	(2)
Historical reconstruction	95	(4)
Dimensionalizing Identity	99	(10)
The normal child	99	(4)
Mapping population dimensions	103	(6)
Becoming at Risk	109	(8)
Surveillance medicine	109	(4)
The new public health	113	(4)
Death of the Old Hospital	117	(16)
Safety and rest	119	(2)
From safety to danger	121	(2)
From therapy to harm	123	(3)
Hospitals and bodies	126	(1)
Reinventing the hospital	127	(3)
Institutional decline	130	(3)
Birth of Primary Care	133	(14)
General practice	134	(4)
A new location of illness	138	(2)
Temporalizing practice activity	140	(5)
A temporal economy	145	(2)
Ecce homo	147	(12)
Political geometry	151	(5)
Through the prism	156	(3)
Identity of the Observer	159	(16)
Identity of the doctor	160	(4)
Medical reflection	164	(4)
Embodiment	168	(4)
Observer to subject	172	(3)
The Subject of Knowledge	175	(12)
Interpretations	175	(3)
Historical discontinuities	178	(4)
Readings and authorship	182	(5)
A Note on Methodology	187	(12)
A hierarchy of texts	188	(8)
History without an agent	196	(3)
References	199	(12)
Index	211